Stories are perceived as central to modern life.

Not THE KEY DEBATES 7

only in narrative entertainment media, such as
television, cinema, theater, but also in social

THE KEY DEBATES

Mutations and Appropriations in
media. Telling/having “a story” is widely deemed
essential, in business as well as in social life. Does European Film Studies
this mark an intensification of what has always
been part of human cultures; or has the realm of The Key Debates is a film series
“story” expanded to dominate twenty-first century from Amsterdam University
discourse? Addressing stories is an obvious priority Press. The series’ ambition
for the Key Debates series, and Volume 7, edited is to uncover the processes
by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever, identifies of appropriation and diffusion
new phenomena in this field – complex narration, of key concepts that have
puzzle films, transmedia storytelling – as well as shaped Film Studies. The
new approaches to understanding these, within series editors are: Ian Christie,
narratology and bio-cultural studies. Chapters Dominique Chateau, José Moure

STORIES
on such extended television series as Twin Peaks, and Annie van den Oever.
Game of Thrones and Dickensian explore
distinctively new forms of screen storytelling in
the digital age. Contributions by:

European Film Studies

Mutations and Appropriations in

THE KEY DEBATES

Vincent Amiel
“ There are very few book series that fully keep to what they Jan Baetens
promised, as the ‘Key Debates’ does. An incredible effort Dominique Chateau

STORIES
in critically covering wide regions of our field – with their Ian Christie
traditional assets and their sudden innovations. Visual John Ellis
storytelling poses puzzling questions: the seventh volume Miklós Kiss
of the series tries to answer them.” Eric de Kuyper
– Francesco Casetti, Yale University Sandra Laugier
Luke McKernan
“ Rather than explaining our previous accounts of story- José Moure

Annie van den Oever (eds.)

Ian Christie and
telling and story-viewing, this exciting collection opens up Roger Odin
the field to important new questions about complex, large, Annie van den Oever
and transmedia narratives. It is a valuable contribution Melanie Schiller Ian Christie and 7
to research on how and why we engage with stories.” Steven Willemsen Annie van den Oever (eds.)
– Janet Staiger, University of Texas Robert Ziegler

“ An indispensable collection of essays exploring the

ISBN 978-94-6298-584-1
complexities of storytelling in today’s multi-faceted media
environment. This volume constitutes another important
contribution to ongoing debates in Film and Media Studies
provided by a remarkable book series.”
– Frank Kessler, Utrecht University

Amsterdam
AU P. nl Universit y
Press
Stories
The Key Debates

Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies

Series Editors
Ian Christie, Dominique Chateau, José Moure, Annie van den Oever
 Stories
Screen Narrative in the Digital Era

Edited by
Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by generous grants from the Research Institute
ACTE – Paris 1, Panthéon Sorbonne, and the Nicolaas Mulerius Foundation of the University
of Groningen.

Cover illustration: Twin Peaks Season 3: an uncanny audiovisual product that challenges
every storytelling convention we know.

Cover design: Sabine Mannel

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.

isbn 978 94 6298 584 1

e-isbn 978 90 4853 708 2
doi 10.5117/9789462985841
nur 670

Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)

I. Christie, A. van den Oever / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018

Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
 Contents

Editorial 7

Acknowledgments 9

1. Screen Narrative in the Digital Era 11

Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever

Part I – Theory in Contemporary Contexts

Reassessing Key Questions

2. Stories and Storytelling in the Era of Graphic Narrative 27

Jan Baetens

3. Rediscovering Iconographic Storytelling 45

Vincent Amiel

4. Wallowing in Dissonance: The Attractiveness of Impossible

Puzzle Films 55
Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen

5. “Storification”: Or, What Do We Want Psychology and

Physiology to Tell Us about Screen Stories? 85
Ian Christie

6. Transmedia Storytelling: New Practices and Audiences 97

Melanie Schiller

Part II – H
 istory and Analyses

7. The Endless Endings of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Films 111

José Moure

8. The Film That Dreams: About David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Season 3 119
Dominique Chateau
9. Spoilers, Twists, and Dragons: Popular Narrative after Game
of Thrones 143
Sandra Laugier

Part III – D
 iscussions

10. Storytelling and Mainstream Television Today – A Dialogue 155

John Ellis and Annie van den Oever

11. The Single Shot, Narration, and Creativity in the Space of

Everyday Communication 167
Roger Odin

Part IV – P
 racticalities

12. Rewriting Proust: Working with Chantal Akerman on

La captive– A Dialogue 175
Eric de Kuyper and Annie van den Oever

13. Introduction to Dickensian: An Intertextual Universe? 181

Ian Christie

14. The Lives of the Characters in Dickensian 183

Luke McKernan

15. Music Structuring Narrative – A Dialogue 193

Robert Ziegler and Ian Christie

Notes on Contributors 199

Index of Names 203

Index of Film Titles 207

 Editorial

The original aim of the Key Debates series was to revisit the concepts, and
indeed controversies, that have shaped the field of film studies. Our intention
was twofold: to clarify what was initially at stake in the founding texts,
and to shed light on lines of transmission and reinterpretation in what
remains a hybrid field of study, which has “appropriated” and thus modified
much of what it uses. The six volumes published to date take different
approaches to this central mission, reviewing how early film theory adopted
and developed literary theories of “strangeness” (ostrannennie); shifting
concepts of subjectivity engendered by film; the variety of ways in which
film audiences have been conceived; the persistence of debate around film
as a technology; the newly energized debate regarding feminist approaches
to film and television; and an up-to-date discussion of display technologies
and screen use in the digital era.
We are delighted to announce that the coeditor of the volume on Screens,
José Moure, has become a Key Debates series editor from Volume 7 onward.
When we launched this book series in 2010, after a phase of preparation
which began in 2006, we felt that as scholarship in the history of film theory
developed, there was a need to revisit many long-standing assumptions,
particularly in light of the changes in media devices and viewing practices.
Further volumes are now in preparation, as we recognize that pervasive
digital media have not made the concepts and debates to which film initially
gave rise, redundant. On the contrary, there seems to be a greater need
than ever to clarify and refocus fundamental issues, such as stories and
storytelling in the present volume, in the context of our contemporary
media environment.

London / Paris / Amsterdam / Groningen

Ian Christie, Dominique Chateau, José Moure, Annie van den Oever
 Acknowledgments

Stories is not a book that is organized around a single thesis – apart from
the assertion that stories are a major concern for film and media scholars,
whether approached in terms of philosophy, aesthetics, narrative theory,
cognitive studies, transmedia storytelling and convergence theory, complex
narration, historical poetics, metahermeneutics, or the industry’s or the
practitioner’s perspective on storytelling. Throughout this book, there is an
emphasis on critical concepts, methods, and debates. Stories deliberately
includes contributions by film and media experts working in very different
ways on a wide range of storytelling-related issues, and it does so in the spirit
of the series, The Key Debates, in which it marks the start of a third phase
of unique transnational cooperation, centrally between the Netherlands,
France, and the UK. The series has already supported a number of stimu-
lating symposia and workshops in all three countries, and produced six
collections, Ostrannenie (2010), Subjectivity (2011), Audiences (2012), Technē/
Technology (2014), Feminisms (2015), and Screens (2016).
The series, like this particular book, owes much to Dominique Chateau
and José Moure and the ongoing discussions between the series editors of
the topics debated in this series. One of the real challenges of this project has
been bringing together an international group of scholars from a variety of
countries, who speak different languages and come from different cultural
and (inter)disciplinary backgrounds. Once again, the real pleasure was
seeing all the different inputs coming together, challenging and occasionally
contradicting one another, yet eventually achieving a sense of coherence.
Therefore, we wish to express our sincere gratitude to the contributors to
this book and to the members of the Editorial Board for their enthusiastic
support and generous intellectual contributions to our series. For their
contributions to this book, we sincerely thank Vincent Amiel, Jan Baetens,
Dominique Chateau, John Ellis, Miklós Kiss, Eric de Kuyper, Sandra Laugier,
Luke McKernan, José Moure, Roger Odin, Melanie Schiller, Steven Willemsen,
and Robert Ziegler. Additionally, we wish to thank Martin Lefebvre for his
generous sharing of knowledge about Christian Metz; and Naòmi Morgan,
for her translations from the French.
Most of the Editorial Board members were already present at the very
first meeting which helped to shape the series and move us ahead. We once
again wish to thank Francesco Casetti, Laurent Creton, Jane Gaines, Frank
Kessler, András Bálint Kovács, Eric de Kuyper, Laura Mulvey, Roger Odin,
10 Stories

Patricia Pisters, Emile Poppe, Pere Salabert, Heide Schlüpmann, Vivian

Sobchack, and Janet Staiger.
Our thanks are due to Amsterdam University Press for its supportive
enthusiasm in every phase of this series, from its infancy to becoming an
international project, with this our seventh book and two forthcoming titles
in preparation. In addition to thanking all the authors who responded to
a tight deadline, acknowledgment is due to the Commissioning Editor of
Media and Communication at AUP, Maryse Elliott, who provided us with
extremely generous support.
The project also has depended on generous funding from Paris 1,
Panthéon-Sorbonne and the University of Groningen, without which it
would not have been possible. We also thank Giovanna Fossati, Head Curator
of EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, for hosting The Key Debates workshops
in Eye and in the New Collection Centre together with the series editors.
Finally, we would like to pay tribute to copy editor Wendy Stone, and to
Viola ten Hoorn, without whose dedication neither this series nor this book
would have existed, and to acknowledge the vital continuing support and
patience of Chantal Nicolaes, Chief Editor at AUP.

Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever

London / Amsterdam, Spring 2018.
1. Screen Narrative in the Digital Era
Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever

Wordless storytelling is natural. The imagetic representation of sequences of

brain events, which occurs in brains simpler than ours, is the stuff of which
stories are made.
‒ Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (2000, 188)

“Stories” are inescapably central to modern media discourse, not only in

traditionally narrative entertainment media, such as television, cinema, and
theater, but also in social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, blogging),
and “new media” (online gaming, VR). Furthermore, telling or having “a
story” is widely deemed essential in advertising, commerce, and social
life. Not surprisingly, teaching and coaching in storytelling has become
a major industry. “Creative writing” courses are heavily subscribed and
advice is ubiquitous.
Storytelling was clearly of major importance in the development of cinema
and television, as well as new forms of printed and graphic media, during
the early twentieth century. But even if these media were new (or, more
accurately, new inflections of existing screen and print forms), storytelling
is as old and universal as any sense of consciousness, according to the
neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio. He further suggests that the “natural
pre-verbal occurrence of storytelling” may be why drama and later written
narratives emerged, “and why a good part of humanity is currently hooked
on movie theatres and television screens” (Damasio 2000, 188). For Damasio,
echoing what Hugo Münsterberg (1916) claimed just over a century ago,
“movies are the closest external representation of the prevailing storytelling
that goes on in our minds” (188).1 However, in trying to account for “the
making of core consciousness,” his concern is less with the mind/cinema
analogy than locating storytelling in an evolutionary sequence that starts
with “mapping,” which “probably begins relatively early both in terms of
evolution and in terms of the complexity of the neural structures required to
create narratives” (189). He therefore concludes that “telling stories precedes
language, since it is in fact a condition for language, and it is based not just
in the cerebral cortex but elsewhere in the brain” (189).
But if it is a precondition for language itself, then a more developed
storytelling ability is also a defining feature of what we call “culture.” In his
12 Stories

landmark book, The Interpretation of Cultures, anthropologist Clifford Geertz

(1973, 89) formally defined culture as “a system of inherited conceptions
expressed in symbolic forms by means of which [wo]men communicate,
perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”
However, he also defined it more succinctly as “stories we tell ourselves
about ourselves.”2 Gaining a perspective on the present or the immediate
is always difficult. Therefore, we might wonder whether the contemporary
preoccupation with “stories” marks an intensification of what has long
been latent in our culture, or whether it signals a new direction, perhaps
comparable to the surge of concern with “media” in the 1960s. At any rate, it
is an obvious priority for the Key Debates series. In this volume, we prioritize
new phenomena in the field (complex narration, puzzle films, transmedia
storytelling), trying to identify the “key issues” amid the vast amount of
discussion and analysis on the topic, while also indicating what seem to
be the most promising paths in research.

From the Archive

The major motivating question behind this latest book in our series is:
Has storytelling – or story-following – changed decisively, either during
the era of “cinema” or, perhaps more pertinently, in the postcinema era
of digital and interactive media? We find ourselves wondering about the
relationship between “story” as a term used in everyday as well as academic
discourse. Does all narrative form deal with what we would call “stories?”
And, indeed, does overuse of the term “story” devalue or detract meaning
from what we would formerly have called a story? While creating the book
(as we would say in storytelling mode), we had in mind two key moments
in conceptualizing the nature of “story”: one a “delayed” essay by Walter
Benjamin, and the other a somewhat neglected essay by Christian Metz.
Like much of Benjamin’s work, “The Storyteller” was written in the 1930s,
but only reached its wider audience in an English translation presented by
Hannah Arendt in 1969.3 In it, Benjamin lamented the end of the oral era
and the loss of storytelling as a social and fundamentally communal practice
within the oral tradition. 4 He defined storytelling as a participatory art,
led by a skilled storyteller whose social function was defined by his or her
community. Listening to a story in such a context meant taking part by
actively responding to the questions and gestures of the storyteller, in what
Benjamin considered a two-way communication rather than a monologue.
This “culture of participation” – as it would be called today if we take the
Screen Narr ative in the Digital Er a 13

discussions of current transmedia-storytelling practices as a model – was

central to Benjamin’s text.
What gave this practice of storytelling its most basic authority? For Ben-
jamin, stories were cultural phenomena with a specifically social function.
They did not simply derive from the need to share interesting experiences
with a community, but a more deeply felt human need: to provide real-life
examples of coping with the mystery of human reality. Hence, one did not
just listen to a storyteller: one received advice. This is one of the crucial
statements in “The Storyteller.” If storytellers always offered advice, the
question must be: Is there still room for this social practice in the modern
world (of the 1930s)?
Benjamin’s answer was negative. With some nostalgia, he observed that
socially driven storytelling practices rooted in the oral tradition were coming
to an end for various reasons.5 He identified the most basic as a change
in the communicability of experience itself and, most importantly, of the
experience of death. What used to be an experience of the community had
disappeared from public life: the waiting, the soft talking, the walking in and
out of the house for the days it took to die, people suddenly coming together
to say farewell to the dying person. This social practice was described in
the famous 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, when it was
already slowly disappearing, together with storytelling as a social practice.
If we wonder why there is such a keen interest in Benjamin’s text among
scholars today,6 we must acknowledge not only its nostalgia but also its
evocation of communities “telling stories to each other.”
The trend that has provoked renewed interest in Benjamin’s essay
could be described as pointing away from criticism and interpretation,
hermeneutics, the medium-specif icity of narratives and formal narra-
tive structure, toward stories as reflections of experience, as affecting
experience, creating absorption in the storyworld. These shifts also
seem to be ref lected in renewed attention to the work of Christian
Metz, one of the founding f igures of modern f ilm theory. Metz has been
represented in various ways, but only recently as a phenomenologist.
He wrote about Narratif (with a capital N) in a 1966 essay which ad-
dressed stories and storytelling as general phenomena, writing of the
fundamental anthropological gesture of storytelling from an explicitly
phenomenological perspective (Chateau and Lefebvre 2014, 23-28).7 His
primary question was: Which qualities do all narratives likely possess
in order to be recognized as such?
His answer did not attract much attention, probably because the emergent
study of narratology did not need the input of this sort of phenomenology
14 Stories

– especially since, in this text, Metz was not seeking the specific sense
or phenomenological qualities of cinematic or literary narratives. His
aim was to explore and clarify the preconditions that make the project
of a Semiology of Narrative possible. As narratology was embarking on an
analysis of signification at the time, this would first require a parsing of the
world in terms of sense: the “naive,” presemiological, “lived” sense of what
a narrative is. In line with Metz’s famous “impression of reality,” Narrative
was termed the “impression of narrative.” With these reflections, Metz
pointed to what precedes and makes possible narratology as the study of
narrative in cinema – its phenomenological condition of possibility. We
can “scientifically” study narrative because we already have a nonscientific
sense of what narrative “is,” of its qualities.
There have been other significant story-related transitions taking shape in
the digital era, which digital technologies have helped to create. In particular,
the twenty-first-century display devices and new screen technologies –
tablets, watches, glasses, wearables – all typically used by individuals,
intimately and repetitively, creating large cohorts of well-trained users in
the process. Several new practices of use have sprung from these. Above
all, there is the film viewer shifting between devices to watch multiple
images; and all these devices invite viewers to become possessive of the
film image, to become possessive viewers, a term coined by Laura Mulvey
in 2006.8 By manipulating their smart devices, they take control over the
image, manipulate the story flow, return to moments of special interest,
touch the image, enlarge it, and so on. What does this do to their role as
viewers, to their knowledge of film, or stories told on film?

Storytelling on Demand

Jason Mittell (2006) famously stated that narrative complexity became the
norm on American multichannel television from the 1990s onward. “Quality
television” became an option for networks such as HBO, aiming at a section
of the audience solely invested in high-quality entertainment. Mittell argues
that the popularity of such television series has helped create a new mode
of active and reflexive viewer engagement. Ultimately, the film industry was
also to profit from the new narrative skills viewers acquired over the years,
mainly by binge-watching “on demand” and narratively complex television
series, often for many hours each week, if not daily. Most viewers will have
spent more time watching complex television than complex films. Thus, the
“training” effects of television have tended to be evident. Not surprisingly,
Screen Narr ative in the Digital Er a 15

cinema has been affected by the long-term impact of television series on

viewers, as it has been by the effects of video and computer gaming.
Many films made for the cinema from the 1990s onward tell stories which
are “complex.” Examples include Wild at Heart (1990), Pulp Fiction
(1994), The Usual Suspects (1995), The Matrix (1999), The Sixth Sense
(1999), Memento (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001), Adaptation (2002),
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Inception (2010).
These films have “embraced a game aesthetic, inviting audiences to play
along with the creators to crack the interpretive codes to make sense of
their complex narrative strategies,” as Mittell wrote in his seminal article
“Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television” (2006, 36).
His explanation was that “narratively complex programs” which were
“constructed without fear for temporary confusion for viewers,”9 may have
triggered a sense of “temporary disorientation and confusion” in viewers, but
they also provoked, and allowed “viewers to build up their comprehension
skills through long-term viewing and active engagement” (38). In the end,
these complex programs turned viewers into what Mittell described as
“amateur narratologists” (38).
This process was supported by fan cultures which would have been
impossible in terms of scale, speed, and intensity without social media. Fans
found ways of reaching out to one another on global fan blogs; and having
sophisticated discussions regarding the tricks and twists used in their
favorite series. Other phenomena that have affected storytelling practices
today include: fan cultures nourishing the narratologist in viewers who end
up knowing as much about story structures and techniques as scholars, if
not more; fan cultures being nurtured by television’s writing teams or more
often by its producers; fans shifting from being solely consumers to becoming
occasional producers, as “prosumers”; and some fans going from creating
forms of cross-media communication about their favorite storyworlds to
using sophisticated storytelling methods themselves, diverting from and
adding to popular stories online in what has been referred to, since 2003,
as transmedia storytelling (see Chapter 6).
Amateur narratologists are fans who like to be challenged and tested – by
the complex narrative forms that can be explained by professional nar-
ratologists, such as the notoriously confusing form of metalepsis, discussed
by John Pier in the Living Handbook of Narratology (2013), and now regularly
found in mainstream, industry-produced films such as The Matrix and
Inception. This phenomenon implies that not only do audiences understand
such puzzling complexities, they obviously appreciate them, as fan sites
testify (and as Kiss and Willemsen explore in Chapter 4).
16 Stories

About the Book

In the first part of the book, Theory in Contemporary Contexts: Reassessing

Key Questions, Jan Baetens poses key questions regarding visual and literary
forms of storytelling. His investigation of “Stories and Storytelling in the
Era of Graphic Narrative” leads him to conclude that given the diversity
and inequality of stories, a “global,” cross-medial approach to stories and
storytelling is problematic. He also argues that, although graphic narrative
(as in graphic novels) is not a field that has the same cultural and economic
importance as cinema, it offers a significant opportunity. Given the diversity
of the field and the quick changes that characterize it, it can serve as a
useful echo chamber for ideas and hypotheses to test in the broader fields
of film studies and storytelling in general. Against this background, Baetens
proposes the study of graphic storytelling as a key domain in the larger field
of cultural narratology, of which film studies is a subfield.
In the third chapter, on iconographic storytelling, Vincent Amiel deals
with visual figurative thought: a system of meaning specific to images,
which owes nothing to the logic of writing. He starts by acknowledging
that normally iconographic and narrative systems are placed in opposition
to one another, as if specific qualities inherent to the very principle of the
image would be unable to enter the storytelling process. The heart of the
chapter consists of an in-depth discussion of combinations of images which,
though inscribed in the unfolding process of a film, nevertheless suggest
discontinuity and a different logic of articulation. In his discussion of this
logic, which is very different from classical narrative, Amiel shows how, by
way of collage, overlay, inlay, or objectification, such offset images complicate
the flow of films, and generate networks, ridges, or narrative systems that
deliberately confuse the course of the film. In what is a plea for the study of
the relations between images which are part of a nonlinear, iconographic
logic, Amiel analyzes such combinations of images which establish a dialogue
on the screen, outside of the conventional rules of successive presentation.
The fourth chapter examines a set of phenomena grouped together
under the label of “complex narratives.” These emerged from the mid-1990s
onward in popular cinema and in serial television, and have continued to
increase in prominence and popularity ever since. Miklós Kiss and Steven
Willemsen present a valuable overview of the f ield, before offering an
alternative analysis of the various experiences of narrative complexity
in contemporary cinema, asking the question: Why would an experi-
ence of confusion triggered by puzzle films be gratifying? This involves
a reconceptualization of story and storytelling complexity in film from a
Screen Narr ative in the Digital Er a 17

cognitive perspective. Next, they analyze how different types of complex

movies evoke different kinds of cognitive puzzlement in their viewers.
Interestingly, they maintain that feeling “challenged” by complex movies
is more important to fans than solving the puzzles presented in f ilms
which dare to confuse viewers, boldly leaving much interpretive and
analytical work to their cognitive and interpretive competences. The
challenge appears to be gratifying, and leaves room for many kinds of
creative, intellectual, analytical, and interpretive skills and processes.
This, in a mainstream context, is novel. Kiss and Willemsen argue that
impossible puzzle films can best be seen as the product of an era that is
saturated with both media and narratives. In such a context, films that
are cognitively challenging and intellectually intriguing are considered
attractive by viewers accustomed to the increasing amounts of mediation,
narrativity, and complication in popular fiction.
“Storification”; Or, What Do We Want Psychology and Physiology to Tell
Us about Screen Stories?” offers a reflection on the two immediate contexts
from which this volume springs. One, as noted above, is the omnipresence
of “story” as a vade mecum in contemporary culture and society. The other
is the promise held out by two new sciences, evolutionary biology and
neurobiology (cognitive psychology or physiology), to address the most
fundamental mainsprings of our relationship to stories. How is it that, as
a species, we alone are innately attuned to storytelling? – a question that
Brian Boyd set out to explore in his On the Origin of Stories (2009). And what
is the cognitive apparatus that enables us to make and attend to stories in
many media? The work of Torben Grodal has sought to bring film within the
orbit of evolutionary biology; while David Bordwell has pursued issues of
how we interpret filmic narrative across a rich series of books, articles, and
blogs, with exemplary attention to researchable case studies. While both
of these remain contentious to some degree, and have indeed deliberately
courted controversy on occasions, they remain essential reference points
as we contemplate the future of scholarship on screen stories.
In her chapter on “Transmedia Storytelling: New Practices and Audiences,”
Melanie Schiller argues that transmedia storytelling is driven by media
users and fans with an increasing desire for transmedia experiences. The
phenomenon fits into the broader context of a growing popularity of user-
generated content and fan productions. Although fostered by the industries,
it is actively contributed to by media-savvy fans creating extensions to
popular stories such as Harry Potter (2001-2011) or The Matrix (1999-
2003). Schiller notes that all this is typically marked by a flow of content
across multiple media platforms, and that for a proper understanding of these
18 Stories

new practices of storytelling, it is important to distinguish them from media

adaptations or remediations which are unidirectional movements from one
medium (book) to another (theater). She shows that transmedia storytelling
is much broader: it involves the expansion of a story through storytelling
activities of participating fans contributing to the story’s universe in a range
of different semiotic systems and historical media practices, all of which
enhance the construction of the overall transmedia storyworld.
In PART II, History and Analyses, José Moure reflects on the type of story
told in a range of films from Michelangelo Antonioni. More particularly, he
shows in an in-depth analysis of a series of his films – from Cronaca di un
amore (1950) to Identificazione di una donna (1982) – that Antonioni
was drawn to telling stories without an end or, perhaps, it would be more
accurate to speak of them as stories with endless endings which spiral down
like a staircase in a dream, without ever allowing audiences to reach the
end. These stories resolve in indecisiveness, as Moure argues. In as far as
Antonioni’s films are constructed, characteristically, around a feeling of loss,
and plotted along erratic, dissolving trajectories which efface or displace
the initial emptiness without filling it, their stories are emblematic of a
certain kind of European art cinema in a specific era.
Dominique Chateau devotes a chapter to the analysis of David Lynch’s
much-admired 2017 television series Twin Peaks 3, what might have been
considered the apotheosis of complex narrativity on American television,
for all its virtuosity and challenges to viewers. Chateau opens his chapter
with praise by Matt Fowler deeming Twin Peaks 3, much like Chateau, “the
most perfect and uncanny audiovisual product” ever made: “a true artistic
force that challenged just about every storytelling convention we know.”
Chateau argues that Twin Peaks 3 is unapologetically and objectively
“strange” given its double use of doppelgänger figures, its genre hybridity,
its endless list of dream cues, the hypnotic use of slowness, and dream
thoughts shifting between significant and insignificant details (if ever
there was such a thing in the Freudian “dreamwork”). Chateau analyzes
Twin Peaks 3 not as a film about dreams but as a “film that dreams,” as
he puts it. By way of a conclusion, he proposes to look at David Lynch’s
“18-hour movie” – not a series, according to Lynch – as strange in a certain
way: everyday, yet grotesquely distorted, thus emphasizing the ambiguous
relationship between strangeness and the familiar.
Finally, in this section, the philosopher, Sandra Laugier, considers the
“moral relevance” of such popular series as Game of Thrones (2011- ).
Based on her regular columns in the French newspaper Libération, this
chapter draws a parallel between the position of the American philosopher,
Screen Narr ative in the Digital Er a 19

Stanley Cavell, who has written extensively about classic Hollywood cinema
as “moral education,” and Laugier’s own view on the moral relevance of
contemporary TV. For Cavell, the educational value of popular culture is
not anecdotal, but defines what we understand by “popular” and “culture.”
Laugier finds the same significance in the popular series of today, such as
The Walking Dead (2010- ) and above all Game of Thrones, which she
defines as “polyphonic,” containing as they do many singular expressions,
arguments, and debates, and creating for their loyal viewers “a moral atmos-
phere.” Against those who would see such series as merely escapist, Laugier
argues that they represent “an empowerment of the audience, who are able
by virtue of their experience and preferences to reach their own judgment.”
Since the radical turn that US series took in the 1990s with ER (1994-2009)
and The West Wing (1999-2006), she argues that viewers have been initiated
into “new forms of life and new, initially opaque vocabularies that are not
made explicit, without any heavy-handed guidance or explanation, as there
was in earlier productions.” As a public philosopher, concerned with ethics
in the modern world, Laugier believes that it is the “new narrativity” of such
series that makes for their moral relevance. And against those who would
decry the alleged sexism of Game of Thrones, she insists that it “releases
or reveals women’s capacity for action, for the populations of the South and
slaves, as liberated by the Khaleesi … democracy is coming.” Indeed, she
claims, “it is women, at least as much as men, who represent [a new] form
of perfectionist aristocracy: Catelyn, Brienne, Arya, Yara, and of course the
Khaleesi.” Laugier writes as a series enthusiast, as a fan, claiming that Game
of Thrones is, in fact, more realistic than historical fiction, finding “its
realism in proximity to the human, and its emotional strength in humanity
and the modest heroism of characters doomed to death.”
PART III, Discussions, is devoted to questions about new forms of storytell-
ing prompted by developments in mainstream television and the everyday
ubiquity of smartphone use respectively. In the first discussion, television
producer and television scholar John Ellis reflects on new phenomena in
storytelling practices in television today. As the author of Visible Fictions
(1982) and other books on mainstream television between the 1960s and
1980s, he famously described watching TV as a very specific activity for
viewers, comparable to “working through,” as in psychoanalysis. However,
we ask whether this is still true of watching television today. Do networks
still allow their viewers to “work through” the themes which trouble and
concern them today and, if so, what types of stories are needed to facilitate
such a process? As a former television producer, now actively involved
in researching past practices of television technique, John Ellis is ideally
20 Stories

positioned to discuss the levels of investment in production values demanded

by Quality TV, and the narrative complexity and character development
(particularly of secondary characters) that serial space allows.
Roger Odin’s chapter, “The Single Shot, Narrativity, and Creativity in the
Space of Everyday Communication” continues the exploration begun in his
contribution to an earlier volume, Audiences, in which he outlined a theory of
the significance of mobile cameraphones marking a new stage in the status
of “film language,” whereby it has become independent of cinema and of
films per se, as simply a means of communication (Odin 2012, 169). Here, Odin
takes the common figure of a continuous mobile image, or “tracking shot,”
to explore “what happens when nothing is happening” in live communica-
tion via cameraphones. In such a continuous image, he notes, “a process of
narrativization is often introduced,” and it is this that makes his chapter a
valuable addition to the phenomenology of mobile communications. His
detailed account of a Skype call between a young couple and grandparents
who are abroad irresistibly recalls an illustration that appeared in Punch in
1878, in which a Victorian couple was shown communicating from London
with their children in Ceylon by means of “telephonoscope.”10 This anticipa-
tion of what we know as Skype was prompted by the launch of Edison’s
Phonograph, an early landmark in the nineteenth-century communications
revolution. Odin’s account of this aspect of our everyday reality demonstrates
how “narration passes through a combination of different devices; and it
really seems to be a new way of telling or showing.” It is, he suggests, yet
another example of our ability to “live creatively,” in the phrase used by the
influential psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott.
PART IV of the book is devoted to a group of reflections on practicalities,
each of which also has a personal dimension. Stories are created, adapted,
and reworked by professionals within the film and television industries,
and two of these chapters take the form of dialogues between the editors
and practitioners, aiming to tap into their practical experience of shaping
stories in the contemporary media world, while the other represents a
blogger’s perspective on a unique recent experiment in British television.
This section opens with the Dutch writer and f ilmmaker, Eric de
Kuyper, recalling his experiences of collaborating with the well-known
Belgian filmmaker and his longstanding friend, Chantal Akerman, who
took her own life in October 2015. De Kuyper describes their approach to
Proust’s celebrated novel-sequence À la recherche du temps perdu, widely
regarded as essentially “unadaptable,” which resulted in Akerman’s film
La captive (2000). He describes his friend, already famous at the age of 25
for the uncompromising Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080
Screen Narr ative in the Digital Er a 21

Bruxelles (1975), as an obsessive reader, who drew him to reading Proust.

When they embarked on the adaptation, he was curious to discover how
she would approach Proust’s complex and labyrinthine novel, with its large
cast of characters, rich evocation of a period and society and, above all, its
intricate plot. He was soon to discover that she was neither fascinated by
Proust’s complexity nor the plot. In general, she thought of the film story
as characters in specific situations and characters in different locations, De
Kuyper says, and in this case, her focus was fully on the theme of “jealousy
in a love affair” and the story of Marcel and Albertine. In retrospect, what
they ended up doing was reworking Proust for La captive: to fit her vision
of what a film by her should be about.
Ian Christie reflects on the history of “extending” and adapting literary
texts by way of introduction to Luke McKernan’s study of the BBC series
Dickensian. A prolific blogger specializing in aspects of early cinema
(as well as a curator at the British Library), McKernan is the coeditor of a
standard reference work on the many screen adaptations of Shakespeare, as
well as a guide to “Victorian filmmaking,” hence his interest in Tony Jordan’s
2015 series is understandable. Jordan has been a pivotal figure in British
popular television over three decades, scripting the major BBC soap opera
EastEnders (1985- ) and creating such innovative series as Life on Mars
(2007). With Dickensian, he created a “fully realized alternative world”
composed of characters and partial storylines drawn from the novels of
Charles Dickens. Extracting episodes from the novels, which first appeared
in serial form, like much nineteenth-century fiction, was already a common
practice in Dickens’s lifetime – he himself gave dramatized readings on
both sides of the Atlantic. And Dickens would become one of the most
frequently adapted sources for both early cinema and television. But as
McKernan argues, Dickensian attempted something more ambitious: creat-
ing a synthesized single narrative composed of identifiable fragments from
otherwise separate “storyworlds.” Although attracting much attention, and
considerable praise, the series fell victim to a common fate in contemporary
long-form screen fiction: it was not recommissioned, although, of course,
it remains accessible in nonbroadcast formats.
The importance of music in screen storytelling can hardly be underes-
timated, and was often discussed during the preparation of this volume.
Yet, rather than commission a chapter analyzing current trends in film or
television composition, we asked the conductor Robert Ziegler, who works
with live orchestral concerts as well as soundtrack recording, for his thoughts
about the practice of musical accompaniment today. The dialogue with
Ziegler led to a brief discussion of the work of Carter Burwell who, as Ziegler
22 Stories

notes, is very good at explaining what he does as a film composer. On his

work for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), Burwell
notes that as the story and the relationships develop, “[Mildred’s] themes
intertwine until, by the last couple of reels, they’re barely recognizable.” In
many ways, this kind of analysis could be applied to film music at almost any
moment during the last hundred years. But as a sign of the times, Burwell
(et al. 2013) is also actively interested in discovering what neuroscience
can reveal about the unconscious part that music plays in our narrative
absorption.
The potential of the cognitive sciences to explain much more about what
is involved in our familiar practices of story-making, story-following, and
story-sharing has been recognized since the beginning of this century.
As long ago as 2003, David Herman’s collection, Narrative Theory and the
Cognitive Sciences, identif ied “a crossroads where cognitive and social
psychology, linguistics, literary theory, and […] ‘cognitive narratology’
intersect” (Herman 2003). Whether the fissiparous community of screen
scholars is convinced of this direction remains debatable. But we hope that
the present volume reflects at least some of the most promising current and
future sites of activity.

Notes

1. In Audiences (Christie 2012), the psychologist, Tim Smith, referred to Mün-

sterberg’s belief that films “externalized the audience’s inner world” (172).
2. In his essay about Balinese cockfighting, Geertz summarized the signifi-
cance of a story as “a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they
tell themselves about themselves” (1973, 448). For a large-scale application
of Geertz’s idea to the field of film studies, see Stories We Tell Ourselves
(2009), online at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-
opening-our-eyes-stories-we-tell-ourselves-report-2006.pdf.
3. Hannah Arendt selected the essay for Illuminations, a volume of Benjamin’s
essays, with a now classic essay by Arendt about Benjamin’s life in dark
times. Typically, his essays expressed a deep affinity with Kafka, Baudelaire,
Proust, Leskov (the central figure in “The Storyteller”), and Brecht.
4. In yet another seminal text springing from this dark period in history, these
changes were also discussed, although in terms of representation: see
Mimesis (Auerbach 2003). Auerbach started working on this book in the
mid-1930s, yet Mimesis was only published in 1946, a mere decade after “The
Storyteller.”
5. However, Benjamin saw relics of the tradition in some storytellers in the
modern era, including Leskov.
Screen Narr ative in the Digital Er a 23

6. “The Storyteller” (like “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
ibility”) has been discussed intensively over the decades in the German-
speaking countries, yet long receiving considerably less attention in the
Anglo-American, even if Arendt’s essay did raise attention for Benjamin and
this essay in the 1970s. Recently, however, this essay attracted fresh attention
in, for instance, an elaborate reflection by Charles May (2014).
7. We are grateful for the input of Dominique Chateau and Martin Lefebvre
and in the following paragraph we draw on their reflections and conversa-
tion on the topic. See also their reflection on Metz and Phenomenology
(Chateau and Lefebvre 2014). They argued that “Remarques” grew out of a
moment in Metz’s thinking when his phenomenological “considerations
for sense” intersected with the “semiological considerations or conditions
for signification.” The first section of their essay is entitled “Semiology as
Phenomenology or Phenomenology as Semiology.”
8. Laura Mulvey (2006) devoted a whole chapter to the characteristics of this
type of viewer, born in the age of video and developing quite quickly in the
age of smart technologies. As she expressed, Mulvey took inspiration from
Raymond Bellour’s reflections on the changing viewing conditions available
to the film viewer.
9. To his many examples also belong: Lost, Alias, Veronica Mars, The
X-Files, Desperate Housewives, and Twin Peaks. Mittell argues that
viewers watch such programs, “at least in part to try to crack each program’s
central enigmas – look at any online fan forum to see evidence of such
sleuths at work” (2006, 38).
10. This cartoon, drawn by Gerald Du Maurier, is reproduced at https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephonoscope#/media/File:Telephonoscope.jpg

References and Further Reading

Auerbach, Erich. 2003 [1946]. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt.
Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Burwell, Carter, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Aniruddh Patel, and Alec Baldwin. 2013. “Art of the
Score.” YouTube video, 1:31:26. From a World Science Festival panel, moderated by Alec
Baldwin. November 21, 2013. http://www.carterburwell.com/main/carter_burwell.shtml.
Chateau, Dominique, and Martin Lefebvre. 2014. “Dance and Fetish: Phenomenology and Metz’s
Epistemological Shift.” October 148 (Spring): 103-132.
Christie, Ian, ed. 2012. Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens. Body, Emotion and the Making of Conscious-
ness. London: Vintage.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
24 Stories

Herman, David, ed. 2003. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
May, Charles. 2014. “Walter Benjamin: ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai
Leskov.’” Reading the Short Story (blog), May 1, 2014. http://may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.
nl/2014/05/walter-benjamin-storyteller-reflections.html.
Metz, Christian. 1966. “Remarques pour une phénoménologie du Narratif.” In Essais sur la
signification au cinéma, 23-28. Paris: Klincksieck.
Mittell, Jason. 2006. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet
Light Trap, 58 (Fall): 29-40.
Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books.
Münsterberg, Hugo. 1916. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: D. Appleton and
Company.
Pier, John. 2013. “Metalepsis.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et
al. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/
Metalepsis.
UK Film Council. 2009. Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Cultural Impact of UK Film 1946-2006. Great
Britain: Narval Media/Birckbeck College/Media Consulting Group. http://www.bfi.org.uk/
sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-opening-our-eyes-stories-we-tell-ourselves-report-2006.
pdf.
 PART I
Theory in Contemporary Contexts
Reassessing Key Questions
2. Stories and Storytelling in the Era of
Graphic Narrative
Jan Baetens

Diversity and Inequality of Stories

As claimed by Roland Barthes, one of the founding fathers of modern nar-

ratology, stories are universal and can be told in all media:

There are countless forms of narrative in the world. First of all, there is a
prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of
media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man’s
stories. […] Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all
times, in all places, in all societies […] there is not, there has never been
anywhere, any people without narrative. (1975, 237)

However, if all stories are equal, some are more equal than others and, in
some cases, the difference between stories – whether they are worth studying
or not, prestigious or despised, heavily promoted or ignored, canonized or
kept at the margins as mere entertainment – has to do with issues of medium
and medium-specificity. Although a number of things have changed, words
are still judged as being more suitable for storytelling than just images,
which are typically suited to description and the representation of fixed
objects – see the long posterity of Lessing’s Laocoön (1776) and the still-raging
debates on the respective qualities of the action-oriented verbal sequences
and family resemblance between visual simultaneity and immobile subjects.
Moreover, within the field of visual storytelling, imposed by the spread of
mobile images or the combination of words and images in multiple panels
and series, certain media and image types continue to face strong resis­
tance, either because they are considered hybrid and therefore “impure” or
because cultural gatekeepers define them as lowbrow, if not utterly vulgar.
Once again, much has changed in this regard. It would be absurd to claim,
for instance, that cinema is a less interesting or adequate medium than
literature since it mixes words and images or because it is deeply rooted
in the world of commerce and the culture industries (currently, we all
accept that cinema has “remediated” literature [Bolter and Grusin 1999]).
But these changes in status are far from complete. Think, for instance, of
28 Stories

the continuing scorn of the photo novel (Baetens 2017), a medium that still
suffers from its historical links with melodrama and patriarchal biases
against women’s and girls’ magazines (Gibson 2015).
On the other hand, the universal character of storytelling and story
structures does not mean that narrative is always seen through a positive
lens. From an aesthetic and cultural-historical point of view, many modernist
movements have criticized the normalizing and stultifying effects of narra-
tive, allegedly harmful to all that Modernism should be about, namely the
progressive disclosure of the material infrastructure of the medium – color
and flatness in painting (Greenberg 1940), the productive play of the verbal
signifier in literature (Ricardou 1978), or montage and projection in (analog)
cinema (Krauss 2000), among other examples. From a social and political
point of view, the use of storytelling techniques has been associated with
manipulation and propaganda (Faye 1972; Salmon [2007] 2017). However, its
problematic aspects also appear in the theoretical debates on the reduction
of narrative methodologies to a mere toolbox, which is subject to all kinds
of commercial uses and abuses (Baroni 2017). Once again, it is important to
stress that most recent research has abandoned all extremist and one-sided
refusals of storytelling as such. While Lev Manovich (2000) could still claim
the supersession of narrative structures of classic, that is verbal culture, by
the database logic of digital culture, Hayles (2007) rapidly defended a more
ecumenical approach of narrative and nonnarrative as being inevitably
and inextricably linked. In addition, an author such as Andrei Molotiu
(2009), who has been instrumental in the foregrounding of abstraction in
comics, has never denied the possibility of giving narrative meanings to
apparently nonnarrative forms and structures. However, the resistance to
storytelling – or at least toward certain forms thereof – cannot be reduced
to twentieth-century Modernism. All historians of the (realistic) novel stress
the initially poor reputation of this type of narrative, which was not seen
in the beginning as a culturally legitimate challenger of older and often
much less narrative types of literature (for a broad historical discussion of
this debate, see Auerbach [1933] 2016).
It is against this double backdrop – that of the competition between forms
and media of storytelling on the one hand and the not always unchallenged
position of storytelling as an art form on the other – that I wish to address
the role and place of “graphic narrative” in contemporary narrative. The
stakes of such a discussion are not only intra-medial, that is aiming at
highlighting the medium-specific features of the “graphic narrative” field, but
also intermedial, that is comparative, as is the case with film studies. More
specifically, the study of “graphic narrative” can strengthen and broaden a
Stories and Story telling in the Er a of Gr aphic Narr ative 29

wide range of ongoing debates in film scholarship which, on the one hand,
deal with the status of genre fiction (which is a very different type of fiction
than what is meant by the concept of fiction when it is not customized
with the help of a genre label), the medium-specific attitudes toward the
global move toward digitization (which, in the field of “graphic narrative”
discloses interesting forms of resistance), and, more generally, the place of
narrative itself (which is far from being natural or self-evident in some of
the cutting-edge types of “graphic narrative,” where anti-narrative stances
are less marginal than those in cinema).

Graphic Narrative in the Expanded Field

In recent discussions the notion of “graphic narrative” is no longer a term that

refers to “vividly and visually explicit” narrative, which can be performed
by purely verbal means as well, but an umbrella term that designates the
narrative use of sequentially arranged photographs or drawings, often sup-
ported or enhanced by captions, speech bubbles, and other verbal elements
(for practical reasons, I will focus here on a specific type of graphic narrative,
i.e., that of comics and graphic novels).1 Today, graphic narrative in general,
and comics and graphic novels in particular, have become ubiquitous, both
in quantitative and qualitative terms. They are not only omnipresent (and
commercially successful) but also increasingly accepted as a culturally
valuable form of storytelling.
It is commonly assumed that the opening of literature and literary studies
to comics and graphic novels is a typically postmodern phenomenon, which
firstly has to do with the continuous hybridization of media and art forms
(and since comics and graphic novels generally combine words and images,
they are perfect candidates for this kind of hybridization) and, secondly, the
progressive dismantling of the frontiers between high and low art (and the
merger of literature, a traditional high art, and comics and graphic novels,
a developing form of low art is an appropriate example of this tendency).
Obviously, the impact of these evolutions cannot be denied. However, there
is more at stake in the emergence of comics and graphic novels as literary
forms, more precisely as acceptable forms of literary storytelling (i.e., stories
one can buy in a regular bookshop, teach in high schools and colleges, take
as the object of an academic publication, and, eventually, institutionalize
as the core of new university programs and careers).
The vital reason for such success is not only the postmodern character
of graphic narratives but also the fact that they represent an answer to a
30 Stories

Fig. 2.1: Cover of Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010).
Stories and Story telling in the Er a of Gr aphic Narr ative 31

specific historical problem: that of the gradual vanishing of storytelling

in more highbrow forms of literature around 1980 and thus the mismatch
between supply and demand, that is between what literature was offering to
the larger audience and the expectations of the latter which were no longer
met by the former. In other words, if the public continued to look for models
and examples that told readers how to shape their lives, how to behave in
society in a responsible and satisfying way, and how to work on personal
taste and individual development – all crucial incentives for the larger
consumption of literary narratives – modern literature had become increas-
ingly reluctant to cater to these needs, to which it preferred an esthetically
more radical yet socially more narrow exploration of its own characteristics
(Marx 2005). Jim Collins, a sharp observer of the social reactions to this
shift, has described the effects of the gap between general readers and
modern writers as well as between these readers and academically trained
professional critics. Since the preferences of the latter no longer reflected
those of the audience and its deep-rooted longing for self-cultivation and
social interaction through cultural practices, new types of gatekeepers
and collective involvement in reading appeared, as demonstrated by the
tremendous success of Oprah Winfrey and other middlebrow tastemakers
such as Martha Stewart who proved capable of offering, in a user-friendly
way, what a liberal arts education, overspecialized and dramatically turned
toward theoretical sophistry were no longer providing: affordable models
and best practices for building a good life (Collins 2010).
Since the social need for “relevant,” that is socially and personally “useful,”
storytelling is no longer supplied by certain forms of literature (in this case,
contemporary literature, taking on board the high-modernist critique of
narrative and its desire to turn realistic narrative into pure art), the public
turns either to other forms of literary storytelling, regardless of the artistic
value of its products (romance readers do not care about the lack of prestige
of the genre) or to nonliterary forms, such as movies in the f irst place,
and comics and graphic novels, which take the place that high art literary
storytelling was no longer willing (or smart enough) to occupy around 1990.
The rise of the graphic narrative as a literary form can therefore not be
reduced to internal changes of the medium, as epitomized by the emergence
of the “graphic novel” label during the 1980s (with 1986 as a pivotal year,
with the simultaneous appearance of the first installments of Frank Miller’s
Batman, The Dark Knight Returns and Moore and Gibbons,’ Watchmen,
both “recycled” as graphic novels one year later, and the first volume of Art
Spiegelman’s Maus, whose serialization had started in 1980). The graphic
narrative’s success outside the field of comics, where it first appeared in
32 Stories

Fig.2.2: Cover of the first issue of (A Suivre).

the early nineteenth century, cannot be separated from a larger demand

for storytelling in print. That (serious) comics really aimed at being read
as a literary form, is a claim that is shared by all defenders of the graphic
novel, such as Will Eisner, whose A Contract with God (1978) was explicitly
framed and marketed as a serious fiction for readers who no longer had
the time to read long novels, and Jean-Paul Mougin, the founding editor
of A Suivre (1978-1997), whose opening manifesto in the first issue of the
Stories and Story telling in the Er a of Gr aphic Narr ative 33

magazine foregrounded “l’irruption sauvage de la bande dessinée dans la

littérature” (the bold entrance of literature into comics [1978, 3]). Mougin
militantly quoted as his major models the genre of the adventure novel and
the work of R.L. Stevenson, that is, forms of literature that are dramatically
narrative as well as highly popular but not necessarily highbrow.
The almost organic encounter between literature and graphic narrative
can also help to explain the intriguing question that is raised by Bart Beaty
in various publications (Beaty 2012; Beaty and Woo 2016): Why are comics2 a
medium that, after all, gives more importance to the visual than the verbal,
considered literature rather than a new form of narrative visual art? Beaty’s
main argument with the regard to the mutual misunderstandings, if not
open hostility, between the world of comics and that of art, is of course a
key element in the debate (Frey and Baetens 2018). However, it is no less
important to stress the warm welcome given to graphic narratives in the
field of literature, which partially solves the deep status issues with which
comics and graphic novels were, and still are, struggling.
The graphic narrative case is therefore an excellent illustration of the
cultural and historical embeddedness of any storytelling practice. Stories
may be universal and ubiquitous, but their diverse forms are not equal:
their social status is different, as is the degree of acceptation of storytelling
in different fields. Moreover, these forms compete with one another at
moments of change, which also generate internal changes within each
form. In the next paragraph, I will focus on the most crucial changes in the
domain of graphic narrative, namely the split or tension between comics
and graphic novels.

Graphic Storytelling and Genre Issues

The rapid institutionalization of graphic narrative as a fully fledged literary

narrative form has had many consequences for the treatment of story and
storytelling. It produced a remarkable debate on the internal unity of the
field, which opposed two nearly incompatible stances. On the one hand, the
promoters of traditional comics refused to fully acknowledge the specificity
and autonomous position of a new trend in graphic storytelling, namely
the graphic novel, a type of comic that its defenders considered, quite on
the contrary, as something completely different from traditional comics.
The distinction between these two visions is not purely technical. True,
the distinction between both types seems rather easy to establish: comics
are for kids, while graphic novels target an adult audience; comics are most
34 Stories

often printed in comic books and sold in newsstands, while graphic novels
are available in real bookshops; comics are generally made collectively by
teams of artists hired to closely follow an editorial line and style, while
graphic novels are mostly made by individual authors, who often position
themselves as “auteurs” (in the technical sense coined by French film theory)
and who are in charge of both the writing and drawing of the story; comics
are almost always serial stories, which continue as long as the public is eager
to buy them, while graphic novels tend to be stand-alones, which require
the author to reinvent him- or herself at each new publication; comics are
cultural-industrial products which have to have a recognizable house style
and content, while graphic novels are supposed to experiment with style as
well as content; comics have to obey a strict publication format (size, number
of pages, serialization rhythm), while graphic novels may have various
formats and publication types, and so on. Yet, in spite of these blatant techni-
cal and material differences, the distinction between comics and graphic
novels remains open to debate, not only with regard to drawing techniques
and publication formats but also at the level of storytelling practices. First
of all, for socio-political reasons, the appearance of the graphic novel, which
is often perceived as a quality label given to separate “good” from “bad”
comics, is considered a vicious and politically suspect maneuver to exclude
comics from the more prestigious domains of literature or art, if not as an
even more deceptive operation to save these domains from what is key
to low-art, namely the vitality and vulgarity of mass culture as well as its
direct relationship with actualities and socio-political issues. According to
these critics, the graphic novel is less an attempt to upgrade comics than
an exercise in muzzling what makes popular culture so unacceptable to
high art and elite culture (Pizzino 2016). According to those who maintain
the unity of the field, many comics are actually doing what graphic novels
claim to do, whereas many graphic novels fail to maintain the socio-political
relevance of much lowbrow culture.
Yet the socio-political dimension of this debate cannot be severed from
a properly theoretical and aesthetical debate on the question of storytell-
ing. As a matter of fact, the conflict between comics and graphic novels
reproduces, in more ways than one, the art-historical and literary debate
between traditional works of art, where storytelling remains the key feature
of any creation and consumption, and modernist or modernizing art, where
the focus shifts from the narrative and figurative dimension to something
else (pure form, the documentary, political commitment, for example).
More precisely, the “upscale” resistance to “vulgar” narrative (here, I am
rephrasing the terminology of those who oppose the cultural and aesthetic
Stories and Story telling in the Er a of Gr aphic Narr ative 35

claims of the graphic novel within the larger field of the graphic narrative)
relies on two major mechanisms.
Firstly, many graphic novels prefer to highlight what makes them so
different from comics by rejecting what is often considered to be the basic
feature of popular storytelling: target-oriented plots, high-speed action,
heroic figures, thematic exaggerations, formulaic style, and all kinds of
visual and narrative standardization. Graphic novels, on the other hand,
tend to focus on anti-heroes; emphasize the absence of action to the point
of utter boredom; and systematically underscore repetition, boredom, and
uneventfulness, both thematically and visually (Schneider 2016). In their
most extreme form, these graphic novels turn into “abstract” works, which
no longer have any visible presence of action, setting or character (Molotiu
2009). This anti-narrative stance clearly echoes the typically modernist trend
toward replacing the traditionally dominant pole of temporal structures
by the newly hegemonic aspect of visuality within literature (Frank [1945]
1991; Mitchell 1980).
Secondly, the perhaps overstated difference between (generally overtly)
narrative comics and (sometimes covertly) anti-narrative graphic novels,
also takes the more nuanced, yet culturally no less significant form, of the
difference between genre fiction and fiction in general. Whereas most comics
stick closely to genre conventions – and thus belong to the field of genre
fiction – graphic novels try to avoid all genres that fall prey to this kind of
thematic and stylistic streamlining. Graphic novels either “deconstruct”
existing formulaic genres, such as most exemplarily the “funny animals”
genre reused by Art Spiegelman in Maus, or they explore new genres that
were never within reach of comics, such as the autobiography (preferably
linked with the issues of trauma and disability, often with a strong class,
sex and gender dimension), both in its direct and auto-fictional variants,
on the one hand, and the documentary (as seen in graphic journalism and
graphic biographies, for instance) on the other. The success of these new
genre experiments, most of which are perfectly compatible with the tendency
toward decreased narrativity, is such that critical voices have underlined
the formulaic turn of much of these nonnarrative antinarratives:

Two ideas that have poisoned a cross section of contemporary writing

in general have also, to some extent, seeped into comics. One is the
sentimental memoir (a first-person story that explains why the author
is in the right and why his or her pain and sadness are worse than yours).
The other is the toxic maxim “write what you know”: the idea that, even
in fiction, an author’s imagination has to be directly limited by his or her
36 Stories

personal experience. The rise of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical

comic books brought these ideas into play in comics and opened up the
question as to how cartoonists might best represent their own experience.
(Wolk 2007, 203)

Therefore, storytelling is both the solution and the problem with regard to
the transition from comics to graphic novels in the field of graphic narrative.
On the one hand, the refusal of old genres of comic storytelling (all typically
genre fiction formats: adventure, fantasy, science-fiction, horror) as well as
the more general attempt to escape the constraints of action-driven storytell-
ing, help the graphic novel bring to the fore uncharted territories, subjects,
themes, and characters. On the other hand, this shift is not deprived of new
stereotypes, some of which, as Wolk’s quotation cunningly suggests, are
dictated by the artistic superego of the newly emerged pseudoliterary form.
In an attempt to be taken seriously as real literature, graphic novels copy
the most directly available writing techniques – those taught in countless
creative writing classes – and therefore even more easily fall prey to all
kinds of clichés “real” literature would try to escape.
The combination of new ambitions and old forms also becomes very clear
in the graphic novel’s attitude toward a fundamental technological feature
of contemporary storytelling, namely digitization.

New Stories, Old Media

Seen as a narrative form, rather than as a form of (virtually nonnarrative)

visual art, graphic narrative is also part of a specific cultural industry,
particularly that of the publishing business. It is, therefore, logical that it
follows the major trends of this business, which can be summarized along
three lines, and which rapidly prove to be quite close to what can be observed
in the film industry. Firstly, there is the increasing commercialization of
publishing, where the traditional role of the publisher as cultural gatekeeper
is taken over by the financial interests of noncultural stakeholders that claim
a high return on investment (Thompson 2012; Schiffrin 2000). As a result of
this evolution, the split between commercial trade publishing and old-school
independent publishing has become abyssal (however, even commercial
trade publishing is becoming increasingly dependent on other players in
the field, such as the distribution system – think of Amazon, the largest
bookseller in the world). Secondly, there is the absorption of trade publishing
in multimedia consortia and the necessity to develop new content – or to
Stories and Story telling in the Er a of Gr aphic Narr ative 37

Fig. 2.3: Cover of Charles Hatfield, Hand of Fire (2011).

redesign old content – in various media and on different platforms in order

to achieve supplementary benefits (Brouillette 2014; Murray 2013). In its
simplest form, this tendency translates into the commercial obligation to
38 Stories

adapt a work in other media (and, thus, to sell and resell as many times as
possible the copyrights related to it). Mass culture is not only intermedial;
it is also a type of culture that inevitably migrates from one medium to
another (often with amazing and exciting results). In its more recent and
comprehensive form, this tendency toward medial variation takes the form
of transmedia storytelling, a term that refers to the systematic dispersion
of fiction “across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a
unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium
makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (Jenkins
2007). Thirdly, the entire publishing industry has taken a digital turn that
radically dissociates what was inextricably linked in the traditional book
format: content and host medium (Thompson 2012).
Graphic narrative illustrates these three tendencies very well. Moreover,
each of them powerfully reflects the tension – indeed so well-known in the
film industry, where the financial stakes are incomparably much higher –
between the cultural-industrial strand exemplified not only by many comics,
but also by some graphic novels, and the more independent, “do it yourself”
approach of many graphic novels and some comics. It would be absurd to
believe that there is a seamless match between comics and the trade publishing
industry – currently DC (Warner Bros/Time Warner) and Marvel (Disney) – on
the one hand and graphic novels and independent or self-publishing3 – in the
Anglo-Saxon field mainly Fantagraphics (Seattle) and Drawn and Quarterly
(Montreal) – on the other. Everybody knows the stereotypical antagonism
between the stereotyped vision of the sweatshop industry of the comic book
in its Golden and Silver Age, as famously described by the artists themselves
(Eisner [1985] 2008) and the slightly romanticized reinterpretation of this
industry by their novelist-historians (Chabon 2000). However, the Taylorized
production line of these works was far from stealing creative freedom and, to
a certain degree, managerial control from those whom David Hesmondalgh
(2002) called “symbol creators” (for an example in the comics field, see Hatfield
2011; various examples on film and television are given by Hesmondhalgh).
More generally speaking, the comics industry has repeatedly been un-
critically opposed to the alleged complete freedom of authors in the graphic
novel field, where commercial constraints are no less present. If the comix
underground movement of the late 1960s can be seen as the forerunner of
the (American) graphic novel, one should not forget that the same authors
are now publishing with major companies such as Pantheon, a Knopf
Doubleday imprint. Similar observations could be made on the tendency
toward adaptation and transmedialization, which have become almost
default options in the comics industry, but which remain rather exceptional
Stories and Story telling in the Er a of Gr aphic Narr ative 39

in the graphic novel field. However, it would be a mistake to think that this
evolution is new or even recent in the comics field (for an example of comics
marketing and cross-medial adaptation and appropriation in the nineteenth
century, see Sabin 2003; for an overview of the interaction between comics
and cinema, see among many others, Boillat 2010) or that independent artists
systematically refrain from adaptations or even going transmedial. While it
is true that most authors certainly do refrain from it (it suffices to think of
Spiegelman’s repeated refusal to authorize a film version of Maus), typically
independent authors such as Robert Crumb or Daniel Clowes are not afraid
of collaborating with Hollywood. It should also be stressed that the tendency
toward intermedialization (i.e., the combination of several media within a
single work) is much stronger in the graphic novel industry than in the comics
field. The combination and hybridization of photography and drawing is
incomparably more frequently used in graphic novels than in comics (Pedri
2017). It is not absurd or exaggerated to suppose that there may be a link
with the relative absence of cross-medial adaptations. Since graphic novels
are less frequently adapted for the screen, the dialogue with other types of
media – an inescapable feature of all contemporary graphic narrative – is
not “outsourced” to the film industry, but included in the creative work itself.
However, the most interesting tensions and differences can be observed
at the level of digitization, which continues to be strongly rejected by most
graphic novelists, whereas nowadays, the comics industry is offering most of
its products in electronic formats as well. The resistance to digitization is not
only due to nostalgia and the fetishism of paper and ink (for the author) and
the touch and feel of the book (for the reader), but also the actual making,
printing, distributing, and consuming of graphic narratives, which entails
countless digital steps and aspects. Neither is it due to the less satisfying
results of some digital comics, which often poorly replicate on-screen the
visual affordances of the page and the book, nor to the relative slowness of
the emergence of digitally born comics (Crucifix and Dozo 2018). Instead,
the most fundamental obstacle is the everlasting influence of a proper
narrative mechanism, namely the idea that storytelling on-screen is in
the very first place a matter of “clicking through” from screen to screen.
Most influentially voiced by Scott McCloud (2000), this idea was probably
inspired by the 1990s hegemony of the concept of hypertext fiction; that
is, a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext
links that provide a new context for nonlinearity in literature and reader
interaction. At the moment of the first systematic attempts to establish
digital graphic narratives, hypertext fiction was the new Promised Land
and its prestige definitely influenced the way in which creators imagined
40 Stories

the new digital graphic narratives to come. Not unlike hypertext fiction,
which has almost disappeared from the f ield of literary creation, the
“clicking through” mechanism proved to be a dead end, and one can easily
understand why. The foregrounding of the panel-to-panel (or, in this case,
the screen-to-screen) transition as the driving force of narrative progress
tends to exclusively highlight the linear aspects of graphic storytelling and
minimize the second great dimension of graphic storytelling, namely the
exploration of the simultaneous presence of images and visual elements
within a certain frame (which, in the case of graphic storytelling, is generally
a multiframe: one-panel pages are exceptional, and even then one has to take
into account the echoes between the two pages of the spread). In comics, the
importance of linear panel-to-panel transition is often much stronger than
that of the nonlinear copresence of all elements on the page or the double
spread. It is not uncommon for graphic novels to work the other way round,
foregrounding the singularities of the mosaic-page rather than the features
of its single panels or images. Hence, the differences between both types of
storytelling – the one that focuses on linear unfolding and the other that
underlines the simultaneous presence of different visual items or units – in
a digital environment that still tries to prioritize the “clicking through”
button and which, for that reason, seems more open to comics’ linearity
than the combination of linearity and simultaneity typical of the graphic
novel. One can, however, presume that things will change very rapidly once
graphic narrators have superseded the “clicking through” default option.
To conclude, I would like to stress once again that graphic narrative,
which has now become a major player in the field of narrative in print, is not
a phenomenon that can be explained in literary or artistic terms alone. As
suggested by the past, present, and future of this cultural form, which has
emerged as comics in the margins of the cultural system before being re-
shaped alongside the growing opposition between comics and graphic novels
once it started participating in the field of culturally legitimate storytelling,
in analog as well as in digital forms, graphic storytelling is a multilayered
process in which technical, aesthetic, historical, and ideological dimensions
are inextricably intertwined. The most interesting conclusion that can be
drawn from the study on graphic narrative is that a “global,” that is, a cross-
medial and linear approach to stories and storytelling, is highly problematic.
The study of graphic storytelling suggests that stories do not always evolve in
the same direction in various media and genres and that even without each
medium and genre, it makes sense to pay attention to individual cases, local
contexts, and certain forms of anachronisms. Furthermore, it is important
to note that this is a lesson that may apply to film studies as well. It is true
Stories and Story telling in the Er a of Gr aphic Narr ative 41

that graphic narrative is not a field that has the same cultural and economic
importance as cinema, but the diversity of the field and the rapid, though
not always sustainable, changes that characterize it can serve as a modest
but useful echo chamber for ideas and hypotheses that are tested in the
broader field of film studies and storytelling in general. From this point
of view, graphic storytelling deserves to be studied as a key domain in the
larger field of cultural narratology (with film studies as a specific subfield).

Notes

1. The term “graphic narrative” may be somewhat misleading for non-special-

ists, but it is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to terms such
as “comics” and “graphic novels,” which cover more specialized forms of
the general field of graphic literature (Baetens and Frey 2015). There are, of
course, many other forms of visual narrative such as, for instance, narra-
tive illustrations, as in the multimodal novel (Hallet 2009), not to mention
the various kinds of narrative that rely on mobile images. However, in what
follows, “graphic narrative” will refer exclusively to works in print in which a
story unfolds with the help of drawings, regardless of whether or not these
drawings are accompanied by verbal elements. The emphasis on drawings,
rather than on pictures, is both pragmatically and theoretically motivated.
In spite of the many convergences between these two forms of graphic
narrative, both subtypes are also characterized by many differences. Similar
remarks apply to the hybridized forms of drawn and photographic narra-
tives, which tend to raise very specific questions that are not necessarily of
vital importance for the current discussion.
2. As in his other publications, Beaty is focusing less on graphic novels than on
comics, an attitude that reflects a polemic to be discussed below, but which
does not impact the discussion on literature versus visual arts too much.
3. A highly nuanced approach is all the more necessary since self-publishing
is being increasingly promoted by major distributors such as Amazon, who
uses it as a tool to weaken the position of traditional publishers.

References and Further Reading

Auerbach, Erich. 2016 [1933]. “Romanticism and Realism.” In Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach:
Time History, and Literature, edited by James I. Porter, translated by Jane O. Newman, 144-156.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Baetens, Jan. 2017. Pour le roman-photo (expanded ed.). Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles.
Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. 2015. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
42 Stories

Baroni, Raphaël. 2017. “L’empire de la narratologie contemporaine, ses défis et ses faiblesses.”
Questions de communication 30: 219-239.
Barthes, Roland. 1975 [1966]. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” Translated
by Lionel Duisit. New Literary History 6, no. 2 (Winter): 237-272.
Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics Versus Art. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. 2016. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and
the Field of American Comic Books. New York: Palgrave.
Boillat, Alain. 2010. Les Cases à l’écran. Bande dessinée et cinéma en dialogue. Genève: Georg.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Brouillette, Sarah. 2014. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Chabon, Michael. 2000. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Randhom.
Collins, Jim. 2010. Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Crucifix, Benoît, and Björn-Olav Dozo. 2018. “E-Graphic Novels.” In The Cambridge History of
the Graphic Novel (forthcoming), edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Steve Tabachnick.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Eisner, Will. 2008 [1985]. The Dreamer. New York: Norton.
Faye, Jean-Pierre. 1972. Théorie du récit, Introduction aux “langages totalitaires”, La raison critique
de l’économie narrative. Paris: Hermann.
Frank, Joseph. 1991 [1945]. The Idea of Spatial Form. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Frey, Hugo, and Jan Baetens. 2018. “Comics Culture and Roy Lichtenstein Revisited: Analyzing
a Forgotten ‘Feedback Loop.’” Art History (forthcoming).
Gibson, Mel. 2015. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British
Girlhood. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Greenberg, Clement. 1940. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” Partisan Review 7, no. 4 (July-August):
296-310.
Hallet, Wolfgang. 2009. “The Multimodal Novel: The Integration of Modes and Media in Novelistic
Narration.” In Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, edited by Fotis
Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, 129-153. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Hatfield, Charles. 2011. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson: The University Press
of Mississippi.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2007. “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts.” PMLA 122, no. 5
(October): 1603-1608.
Hesmondhalgh, David. 2002. The Cultural Industries. London: Sage.
Jenkins, Henry. 2007. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Henry Jenkins. Confessions of an Aca-Fan
(blog), March 21, 2007. Accessed November 1, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/
transmedia_storytelling_101.html.
Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition.
London: Thames and Hudson.
Lessing, G.E. 1984 [1766]. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting. Translated by
E.A. McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Manovich, Lev. 2000. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Marx, William. 2005. L’Adieu à la littérature. Histoire d’une dévalorisation, xviiie-xxe siècle.
Paris: Minuit.
McCloud, Scott. 2000. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing
an Art Form. New York: Random House.
Stories and Story telling in the Er a of Gr aphic Narr ative 43

Mitchell, W.J.T. 1980. “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory.” Critical Inquiry 6,
no. 3 (Spring): 539-567.
Molotiu, Andrei. 2009. Abstract Comics: The Anthology. Seattle: Fantagraphics.
Mougin, Jean-Paul. 1978. “Introduction” (untitled). A Suivre, no. 1: 3.
Murray, Simone. 2013. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary
Adaptation. London: Routledge.
Pedri, Nancy, ed. 2017. “Mixing Visual Media in Comics.” Special issue of ImageText 9, no. 2.
http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/.
Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development. Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin:
Texas University Press.
Ricardou, Jean. 1978. Nouveaux problèmes du roman. Paris: Seuil.
Sabin, Roger. 2003. “Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?” Image (&) Narrative 7 (October).
http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/graphicnovel/rogersabin.htm.
Salmon, Christian. 2017 [2007]. Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind. Translated by David
Macey. London: Verso.
Schiffrin, André. 2000. The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over
Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso.
Schneider, Greice. 2016. What Happens When Nothing Happens: Boredom and Everyday Life in
Contemporary Comics. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Thompson, John B. 2012. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First
Century. London: Polity Press.
Wolk, Douglas. 2007. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. New
York: Da Capo Press.
3. Rediscovering Iconographic
Storytelling
Vincent Amiel

Carlo Severi (2007) has rightly observed that, over a history much longer
than that of cinema, both combinations of images and composed images
have constituted another way of constructing meaning as complex, rich,
and often just as narrative as combinations of letters or sound. This is what
is often referred to today as “visual thought” or, as Francastel (1967) puts it,
“figurative thought.” It is a system of meaning specific to images, or their
association, which owes nothing to the logic of writing. This form of thought
has no need to be absorbed or circumvented by the same media which
offer the largest choice of different images, with all their combinations
and declinations.
It is true that the speed of projection, and thus of the persistence of
images, remains an unavoidable condition of their effect; and we would
have a hard time trying to compare film sequences with those of written
or spoken text. However, long ago, cinema discovered ways of breaking
the flow and finding a figurative diversity capable of producing links and
networks other than those of written continuity. Thus, in the same way
that there exists in certain forms of writing a graphic, or even an iconic
dimension that affects or modifies meaning, cinema has many ways of
dealing with images which offer a range of possibilities to create meaning
(Schapiro 1970; Barthes 1970).
If we wish to avoid the totalitarianism of linear and chronological articula-
tion, we can focus on two characteristics that contemporary screens have
revived: the spatial configuration of images in relation to one another and
the diversity of their forms.
Today, one of the first consequences of the widespread use of personal
screens has been the new experience of the spatial arrangement of screens
and their frames. On computer or mobile phone screens, images and frames
are moved, interlocked, and zoomed in or out according to the viewer’s
will. Thus, the images and frames interact with each other. An algorithmic
logic, which takes on some of the autonomous, self-consistent characteristics
of f iction, allows images to appear, and to modify, transform or follow
one another, thus turning upside-down our habit of distinguishing the
frame from the background. Here, I am referring to the so-called “cookies”
46 Stories

that pop up for advertising or informational purposes. Images appear and

confront one another – at least according to the order and hierarchy of
perception – but they also dissolve into one another, quickly becoming
oblivious of their own frame. On touch screens, the void around figures
and signs is not considered a part of the image, but as a useful area able to
be filled up. The very notion of “background” disappears, as in the use of
the term “wallpaper” for screen background (in French, fond d’écran). This
is not part of the image related to the foreground, but is an autonomous,
indifferent space, a neutral surface on which multiple icons appear. Thus,
the image loses all characteristics of a framed whole that it has acquired
during the classical tradition.1 In this respect, it has returned to the way
Schapiro described images in the Middle Ages: “the frame belongs to the
viewer’s space more than the illusory, three-dimensional one that nests
within its limits” (1970, 12). This inscription of several frames on one screen,
of several images that can be seen at the same time, may be considered
archaic. Lately, however, we have grown accustomed to it, and so quickly
that one wonders whether cinema had ever renounced it. Evidently, it had
not and, in a way, cinema has remained a privileged vehicle for it. But the
inscription process displayed itself discreetly, marginally, as though sucked
into the accelerating flux of images and their singular meanings. We are
interested here in such combinations of images: images inscribed in the
unfolding process of a film but which, for the duration of a shot or a sequence,
suggest discontinuity or a different logic of articulation, thus establishing
links that hardly relate to classical narrative logic.

Four Examples

Here, we shall consider images that a film marks as alien, resisting the
narrative flow to which they belong. Furthermore, we shall focus on their
interplay. For instance, they create a competition between the points of
view associated with them at the time of their appearance, between the
strength of their significance as well as their degree of representation. These
characteristics make them different from one another, causing them to
clash and separate from the flow in which they are supposedly integrated.
There are four such types:

– The first type includes multiple images on the same screen. While these
were once arranged in quarters or chequered in the era of silent cinema,
they are currently presented in what is commonly referred to as split
Rediscovering Iconogr aphic Story telling 47

screen. Thus, three or four images can be placed next to one another on
the same screen, but at different speeds and for different durations. “Split
screen” makes simultaneity both effective and possible (“meanwhile
…”). Different points of view are able to coexist (“leaning, one could have
seen …”). In addition, however, there can be unlikely conjunctions of
different realities, whose correspondence may, at first, seem odd. These
first types are the most frequent,2 but they are also the least specific,
since they could easily be replaced by a traditional editing structure
which has consecutive scenes or shots signifying simultaneity – one
of the common functions of insert shots. The third example is more
interesting, because it does not follow a cause-and-effect logic, and is
not part of the narrative flow. It involves such plastic elements as colors,
rhythms, and types of image. An early example would be the famous
pillow battle in the dormitory, in Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927).
– Such images do not merely share the screen, but can be superimposed
on it. This overlaying technique was often used by Gance and other
experimental filmmakers of the 1920s. Two, three, or more overlays of
images are visible to the viewer. While it is sometimes difficult or even
impossible to distinguish one layer of image from another, the principle
remains explicit. The final shot of Anthony Perkins in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho (1960) uses this process in a peculiar way: it superimposes the
face of the son on the mother’s and relies on the viewer to consciously
combine the two images. It is the same with green- or blue-screen
chroma-key special effects, which substitute a different background
for a figure photographed against a solid color.3 Instead of remaining
undetectable, as they normally do, these can make one aware of the
hybrid quality of the shots in question. Caroline Renouard has brilliantly
demonstrated how this is done in L’Anglaise et le Duc (2010). Eric
Rohmer makes two eras interact with one another by superimposing
two types of images in the same shot (Renouard 2012, 410-419).
– The third form of image association involves explicit inlays, meaning
that these are not used to achieve a trompe-l’oeil effect. I am referring
to widely used effects that video has multiplied, first on television and
then on cinema and computer screens. These inlays consist of “windows”
within a mother-image, a window in which a different action takes
place and another reality is shown. Examples include the inlays opening
during television news programs, which the French television artist
Jean-Christophe Averty has turned into a playful game. Referred to as
“icons” on computers and mobile phones, they allow one to proceed
from one layer of content to another. Such inlays allow for intellectual
48 Stories

trajectories, classification, comparison and removal: in other words,

more than merely following a story. The process was seldom used in
films until it was developed by video; now it offers the opportunity to
create complex links between images by articulating, for instance, the
relative status of encompassing and inlayed images, hence of primary
and secondary events.
– Finally, there are images that establish yet another level of difference
from their neighbors: object-images that form part of the diegesis, book
covers, posters, television or film screens, and paintings. Filmmakers,
such as Godard, Hitchcock, and Rohmer, have consciously multiplied
the articulation of these images within the shots of their films. Between
the explicit meaning of these images and their potential connection
with others lie the most obvious difference and articulation of visual
thought from conventional narration that we are trying to distinguish.
A poster on a wall may be connected with a social or dramatic context;
scenes watched on television may feed into the story in which a character
is involved. These are simple narrative links that contribute to the
linear and contextual reading of a film. However, if a painting or any
other type of object-image is related to the story in a more complex
way and is free from a strictly directional vision, this is typically an
example of what such images can produce. 4 Thus, the object-image,
first identified as being part of a set, is legitimized as well as erased by
the diegetic realism; it then becomes an inlaid entity which is able to
establish complex correspondences with the rest of the film, through
its meaning, plot relevance, or any of its formal elements.

Therefore, by way of collage, overlay, inlay, or objectification, offset images

complicate the flow of films, generating networks, ridges, or narrative systems
that deliberately confuse the course of the film. They are indeed offset because
of the way they appear, their specific forms, and “medial” situation; the
element of mediation, one might say, which they allow to appear and which
constitutes them. By way of a simple effect due to usage – which is actually
intrinsic to the very notion of image – it is when they multiply within a single
frame that they actually reveal their nature as images; when their succession
does not, in any way, affect the transparency of their representation.
This auto-eidetic dimension of the image should not be minimized: it is
by departing from the apparent evidence of its mimetic storytelling that
cinema is able to escape prevailing narrative habits. The power of realism is
such that, since the beginnings of cinema, its effectiveness has a stunning
effect. A deliberate deviation, an explicit shift is necessary for another logic
Rediscovering Iconogr aphic Story telling 49

of meaning to appear – or to insinuate itself in a more discreet way. Within

the apparent movement of elements of the diegesis, which immediately
establishes the possibility and necessity of a story, it is essential to create
a visible rupture, not only in the form, but also in the system of images.

An Iconographic System?

It is common to place the iconographic and narrative systems in opposition

to one another, as though specific qualities inherent to the very principle of
the image were unable to merge with the storytelling process. The opposi-
tion, however is false because, for the most part, it focuses on one image, in
other words, a single moment or situation within the flow that is inherent
to narration. The two opposing systems generate another classic polarity:
description and narration. No quality inherent to the image is at stake here,
unless one considers the image as unavoidably static – which cinema itself
contradicts. Thus, if one considers a plurality of images in space and time,
it is legitimate to wonder how they can make sense when taken out of the
story, or how they can make sense as a narrative. If, indeed, there is such
a thing as an iconographic system, it is not opposed to a narrative or any
other discursive or demonstrative system. An iconographic system would
be contrasted with a vocal, linear, one-level system, as is mostly the case
with the written system. In other words, image is not to be opposed to
narrative, but to time-regulated narrative. In oral and written traditions,
ephemerality and fluidity regulate the economy of story and its reception:
thus, it is necessary to find stable points within it. The notion of “narrative
identity” (identité narrative) proposed by Paul Ricoeur (1985) refers to oral
(or written) narrative resisting its own mechanism. It establishes the narra-
tive’s need to maintain some kind of permanence within the never-ending
transformation generated by temporality. However, this reflection about
identity would not occur if there was no transformation, no constant fading
of shapes and figures. What is precisely impossible as far as the image and
cinema are concerned is the capacity to maintain the successive stages of a
story in some kind of timeless simultaneity. Split screen and superimposition
allow for the copresence of two realities, not separated by any chronological
gap. According to this schema, simultaneous images convey some kind of
timelessness, a lack of succession, the disappearance of temporal order.
And if there is memory, causal explanation, or time-shift (all cinematic
processes that are common in classic cinema), these constitute specific
cases established by the screenplay and are expressed through conventional
50 Stories

effects (dissolve, iris, etc.), which exploit the intrinsic properties of the
image. The frequency of their occurrence (like, for instance, the obsolete
topos of dissolving on somebody’s face to imply memories) cannot hide this
particular character: coexisting images merely accidentally imply time-shift.
What the image is able to dispose of is what Pierre Bergougnoux (2016)
refers to as “rational storytelling,” which he defines as being bound by some
conventional rules: the fixed identity of characters; the spatio-temporal
orientation of the universe in which they move; and strict observance of
the causality principle.
Bergougnoux contrasts “rational storytelling” with children’s storytelling,
or “the text of dreams”; but also with mythological narratives or the first
great primitive stories, such as Gilgamesh, which are totally free of such
rules. This is obviously very close to Carlo Severi’s observations on visual
thought in nonwritten traditions.
Such visual thought literally disorganizes the narrative, by refusing the
rationality invoked by Bergougnoux, which relies completely on temporal
linearity. Strict causal articulation and maintenance of the same conditions
disappear when temporal flow is replaced by a chequerboard of random
movement. This is what happens when different evolutions, a-chronological
situations and independent rhythms coexist in one image as revealed by
the history of art in tympana and altarpieces. The image is not necessarily
organized around a story that imposes an unequivocal unfolding. According
to Ricoeur, it maintains “discordance” while the narrative project builds
up “concordance.” It is not that the image has banished time or ignored
the story, but rather that it has multiplied them. Within the image, one
can find dramatic scenes that are both dependant on and independent of
one another. Thus, image is not Story (récit), even though it is constituted
by stories that establish meaningful links. It is not Story because the only
unity it confers on the discordance is a formal one; it does not integrate:

the quality of narrative intelligence (which consists in) incorporating

discordance into concordance, with the effect of surprise playing a part
in generating meaning; the consequence is that, afterwards, the fable
seems probable, or even necessary. (Ricoeur 1992, 472)

Nevertheless, it enables these stories to co-exist, maintains each story’s

autonomy and keeps them from scattering. A kind of unity is achieved
because they coexist in one frame, on one support, in one space, and are
able to be taken in simultaneously at a glance by the viewer. This is why
copresence on the screen is so important; the spatial link it establishes
Rediscovering Iconogr aphic Story telling 51

balances the movement generated by the projection of images: a concordance

through becoming (par le devenir).
What Ricoeur refers to as “narrative identity” maintains a single identity
through the story’s continuity in spite of occasional discordance. The process
is at work in film because of its very movement, but it is negated, or at the
very least unbalanced due to coexistence on the screen. When a window is
opened in a John Ford film, or when a superimposition appears in Truffaut,
it is another image, perhaps narrating something subordinated to time; but,
most of all, it is another meaning relationship that appears to the viewer. In
the overlay of two images, in the embedding of one frame within a shot, it
is the determination of each image that disappears, though not completely,
creating a new potential. The correspondences of one image to another
can, of course, be secured by the story – integrated by concordance – as
reminder, premonition; but, most of all, they can introduce something
radically different.

Random Connections

Spatializing the links between images means relieving them of their temporal
conditioning, freeing them from strict graphic-narrative conformity. This
means not only allowing them to escape a strict determination of their layout
and reception, but also simultaneously establish between them original
sensory effects. These can belong to two orders, namely discourse and inner
flow (or, to use William James’s term, “stream of consciousness”). The point
is not to follow the objective and apparent evolution of persons and objects,
but to suggest by the relation between two images, a different movement,
which could be that of discursive thought, external to phenomena, or of
intuitive inner thought.
When Hitchcock puts a print of Susanna and the Elders on a wall (in
Psycho) or when Arnaud Desplechin makes his main character describe
The Arnolfini Portrait (in Les fantômes d’Ismael, 2017), we can feel these
paintings’ presence, making a formal link with the films, comparing the
plots or structures of the two image systems, and so illuminating the films
through these connections. On the other hand, when in Psycho, the skull
of Norman Bates’s mother is superimposed on her son’s face, or when an
infinite desert landscape appears in a window in The Searchers (1956), it
is by intuition, through an intimate understanding of the object, that a new,
supplementary meaning appears. There are so many discordant elements
within the primary story, which constitutes a succession of events, that
52 Stories

neither the Fordian landscape nor the Hitchcockian disturbed personality

belong to any chronological order. However, we recognize that they are
neither foreign to the story nor secondary to the work as a whole: they are
the very substance and flesh thereof, beyond any need for explanation.
Born of the relations between images, they are as free from time as from
conventional realism.5
But they do belong to the story; in fact, they constitute it. By introducing
a timeless element, they open up a field of possibilities. The mechanics of
cause and effect no longer apply, since spatial cohabitation generates an
all-round potentiality.6 The spatialization of images is therefore not against
the story, nor around it. It is the story itself that gains a new dimension:
characters can change their situation and, in time, their status. For instance,
a daughter can experience what her mother has experienced, the dead can
go on living, and timelines can cross one another. The open frames (cadres
ouverts) in Tarkovsky’s or Parajanov’s images point to an eternity within
a finite world; Wenders’s video monitors in Tokyo-Ga (1985) suggest the
possibility of a universal nomadism. Times collide, causalities disappear,
and identities dissolve.
For all that, the simultaneity of images, which is achieved by avoid-
ing consecutive presentation, and offering the possibility of storytelling
unconstrained by succession, allows something that perhaps was hidden
in the editing process to appear in broad daylight. When images establish
a dialogue on the same screen, they show how relative and conventional
this succession is, as well as how legitimate it is to consider the relations
between images in a nonlinear logic. It implies that it would be well-founded
to envisage the links between images in a nonlinear logic. Then a new
conception of storytelling appears.

Notes

1. “The edge (the physical edge of the panel and the represented edge in
painted architecture) is the active limit of the representation; thus, it ac-
quires the function that it will have in classical painting, assuring and con-
firming the inner autonomy of representation from the outside world (even
if it has to be doubled by a material frame)” (Arasse 2010, 66-67; translation
Ian Christie). See also Stoichita: “The frame separates the image from what
is not image” (1999, 53; translation Ian Christie).
2. As in the famous The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison, 1968) or
in The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990), or in almost any film by Brian De
Palma.
Rediscovering Iconogr aphic Story telling 53

3. Digital chroma-key has replaced the background substitution which used to

be provided by matte processes.
4. Michael Haneke’s films, such as Benny’s Video (1992) and Funny Games
(1997), use television screens in a way typical of these articulations. One can
also refer to the essays of Vancheri (2013, 2015).
5. Some descriptions in Flaubert are of such an order: extraneous to the narra-
tive, but still constituting it.
6. This could be compared with Gilles Deleuze’s “images-cristal,” as having
similar characteristics.

References and Further Reading

Arasse, Daniel. 2010. L’Annonciation italienne. Paris: Hazan.

Barthes, Roland. 1970. L’Empire des sens. Genève: Skira.
Bergougnoux, Pierre. 2016. Raconter. Bordeaux: William Blake and Co.
Francastel, Pierre. 1967. La Figure et le lieu. Paris: Gallimard.
Renouard, Caroline. 2012. “Les effets esthétiques et narratifs de la technique de l’incrustation.”
PhD diss., University of Paris-Est.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1985. Temps et récit III. Paris: Seuil.
—. 1992. Lectures 2. Paris: Seuil.
Severi, Carlo. 2007. Le Principe de la chimère. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly.
Schapiro, Meyer. 1970. Style, artiste et société. Paris: Gallimard.
Stoichita, Victor. 1999. L’Instauration du tableau. Genève: Droz.
Vancheri, Luc. 2013. Psycho. La leçon d’iconologie d’Alfred Hitchcock. Paris: Vrin.
—. 2015. La Grande Illusion. Le musée imaginaire de Jean Renoir. Lille: Presses Universitaires
du Septentrion.
4. Wallowing in Dissonance
The Attractiveness of Impossible Puzzle Films1

Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen

If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.

‒ Tom Peters

There has been no shortage of attention in film studies regarding the cur-
rent trend of complex stories and storytelling. Discussing the increasing
prominence of perplexing narrative forms both in popular cinema and
serialized television, which appears to have emerged from the mid-1990s
onward, scholars have spoken of “complex narratives” (e.g., Staiger 2006;
Simons 2008; Mittell 2015), “puzzle films” (Panek 2006; Buckland 2009,
2014a), “mind-game films” (Elsaesser 2009, 2017) and “modular” (Cameron
2008), “mind-tricking” (Klecker 2013), or “multiform” narratives (Campora
2014). These diverse labels have been used to cover not only a wide range
of films (from cult hits and mainstream blockbusters to international and
historical art cinema), but have also been accompanied by a variety of
approaches. Scholars have used narratological approaches to provide typolo-
gies and taxonomies of various complex films, have examined the (film-)
philosophical implications of these new narratives, or have focused on the
cultural, sociological, industrial, technological, or media-archaeological
contexts from which the trend has emerged.
In our monograph, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to
Contemporary Complex Cinema, we proposed yet another angle, aiming
for an in-depth understanding of the effects and experiences of narrative
complexity in contemporary cinema. We offered a “cognitive reconceptu-
alisation” of story and storytelling complexity in film by analyzing how
different types of complex movies evoke different kinds and degrees of
cognitive puzzlement in their viewers, leading to various viewing effects and
experiences. Our inquiry led us to further questions, such as what kinds of
interpretive responses complex film narratives evoke and encourage, and
how different films have used different modes and degrees of complexity
(from moderately complex “puzzle” and “twist” films to highly disruptive
and excessively complex story structures, in both popular film and art
cinema). This approach singled out a distinct set of movies that we labeled
56 Stories

“impossible puzzle films”: popular films that evoke pervasively confusing

viewing experiences, undermining narrative comprehension by means of
various complicating storytelling techniques and the eliciting of dissonant
cognitions (Kiss and Willemsen 2017, 59). We argued that films, such as
Mulholland Drive (2001), Primer (2004), Triangle (2009), or Arrival
(2016) feature notable degrees of narrative confusion, and employ (counter)
strategies by means of which they strive to keep viewers interested and
immersed in their stories’ challenges and mysteries.
When trying to understand the nature of the viewing experiences that
complex narratives such as impossible puzzle films provide, one question
lurks constantly around the corner: Why would anyone be interested in
confusing stories? After all, why would viewers spend hours attempting
to solve potentially unsolvable puzzles? What pleasure could we take in
fictional stories that are manifestly designed to be excessively complex?
In the following excerpt from the final chapter of our book, we freely
ponder this question: What makes highly complex stories attractive or at least
engaging for (some) viewers? It is not our aim to provide definitive answers.
Thinking about complex film narratives’ potential for engagement or at-
tractiveness implies other important issues that can be rather thorny (such as
why people engage with art and fiction in the first place). Queries of this kind
also generally resist easy or univocal explanations. Moreover, what people
draw from these particular films is likely to vary significantly according
to their individual film and media literacy, personal history, preferences,
competences, and attitudes. Undoubtedly, there is also a significant number
of viewers who do not like this type of cinema, or with whom perplexing
stories simply do not resonate at all. Nevertheless, these caveats do not make
the question irrelevant – on the contrary, understanding what draws some
people to complex stories is a fundamental part of understanding these
films themselves, both in terms of the viewing experiences of those who
watch them, and as a phenomenon in contemporary audiovisual culture.
Therefore, to open up the discussion and disclose further perspectives, we
will devote this contribution to contemplating the possible attractiveness of
complexity, inspired and informed by the observations we have made in our
earlier studies on cinematic narrative complexity (Willemsen 2018; Ros and
Kiss 2018; Kiss and Willemsen 2017; Willemsen and Kiss 2017; Coëgnarts et
al. 2016; Kiss 2012, 2013). It is an attempt to look beyond our usual theoretical
frameworks, loosening the scientif ic rigor, and taking a stance that is,
admittedly, a speculative one.
Most of the popular “puzzle films” found in contemporary cinema can,
in many ways, still be said to provide the type of gratifications that are
Wallowing in Dissonance  57

commonly attributed to classical narrative film. From a cognitive and

affective perspective, Nitzan Ben Shaul characterizes the attractiveness
of classical narrative cinema as follows:

It seems that the challenging of the viewers’ cognitive faculties in a man-

ner that satisfyingly lets them construct out of the movies’ compelling
audiovisual flow a coherent story that leads to closure, along with the
attendant arousal, regulation, and control of tension, mostly through
suspense strategies, are the sine qua non components that account for
the popularity of movies. (2012, 25)

But whereas many popular “puzzle films” restrict their complexity to moder-
ate and motivated forms (Willemsen and Kiss 2017, 5), encouraging and,
ultimately, rewarding viewers’ intensified narrativization efforts with an
attainable solution or comprehension (Kiss and Willemsen 2017, 56), our
previous theorizing also proposed that other films such as the ones that
we have called “impossible puzzle films” offer a more excessive complexity
that frustrates viewers’ narrativizing efforts more strongly, and are thus
likely to offer different viewing pleasures. It is reasonable to assume that
the more complex and confusing a film’s narrative, the less its enjoyment
will correspond to the qualities usually associated with conventionally
realist and canonical “classical narratives” (e.g., immersion, identification,
empathy, the arousal of emotions, and the satisfaction of closure). Films
that present “impossible puzzles,” apparently deny viewers much of this
satisfaction. Although films, such as Mulholland Drive or Donnie Darko
(2001) still involve classical narrative patterns and engaging affects, such
as suspense and tension, they do not allow viewers clear-cut solutions to
well-framed problems, and often deny narrative closure. Rather, impossible
puzzle films are dissonant, ambiguous and open-ended, and may even
leave viewers searching for the story; some even appear not to allow the
construction of any coherent narrative chain of events. Simply put, these
films are confusing – a state of mind that, arguably, most people under most
circumstances would prefer to avoid. However, what appears to be an undesir-
able sensation in real life might be an appealing experience in mediated art;
impossible puzzle films, just like perplexing and dissonant art films (think
of postwar modernist art cinema), have attracted a considerable audience
and critical acclaim. The question as to what underlies the fascination with
such films thus becomes a rather intriguing one; it seems that complexity
in a story can also entail a distinct appeal of its own. While working on our
book, we accumulated some ideas and hunches for potential reasons for the
58 Stories

attractiveness of cognitively dissonant and highly complex stories. Below,

we will share eight of these ideas in the form of explorative hypotheses. No
rigid factuality should be ascribed to these – they are not “claims” as such;
rather, we hope that our reader will feel invited to think along, to bring in
his or her own knowledge and experiences, and to reflect further on the
possible pleasures and functions of this particular type of cinematic story.

Hermeneutic Play and Interpretive Multiplicity

One unique aspect of engaging with highly complex or impossible puzzle

narratives could lie in the peculiar meaning-making activities that they
allow. In a previous discussion of the possible interpretive responses to
dissonant stories, we noted that they can evoke what we call hermeneutic
play through repeated frame-switching (Kiss and Willemsen 2017, 130-139).
Impossible puzzle films do not allow a single interpretive resolution to
achieve full closure; rather, they appear to be designed to keep viewers
in a loop of sense-making. In so doing, they evoke a perpetual sense of
“cognitive dissonance”2 that encourages an enduring search for a satisfying
resolution or a clear meaningfulness. This invites viewers to repeatedly try
out different interpretations, frames of knowledge, analytical strategies,
and critical competences, without necessarily settling on a single outcome.
This prolonged interpretive quest, we hypothesize, can maintain a distinct
interpretive multiplicity that viewers may appreciate for various reasons.
First of all, this lack of closure and interpretive hierarchy may be deemed
liberating. In terms of engaging with fiction, impossible puzzle films offer
an appeasing alternative to the closed, teleological cause-and-effect logic
of classical film narratives.3 They refuse to adhere to the singular logic and
typical closure that characterizes the vast majority of classical narratives with
which contemporary audiovisual culture is saturated. Highly complex stories
that challenge (but do not entirely break with) this familiar mode of classical
narration may thus simply be attractive for their novelty, offering a refreshing
variation on the very common ways of engaging with fiction, or even self-
reflexive “metafictional” pleasures. More broadly speaking, viewers may also
appreciate these films’ resistance to sense and meaning-making as a triumph
over reason and order at large. For instance, one frequently heard argument
is that highly complex film narratives form a critique of the Enlightenment
values that determine much of the modern scientific worldview (e.g., Panek
2006, 67). A work’s noncompliance with being rationally contained can
be appreciated as liberation from modern Western scientism, or from the
Wallowing in Dissonance  59

cultural dominance of qualities, such as objectivity, logic, clarity, purposeful-

ness, predictability, agency, and explanation. In addition, viewers may value
complex classical narratives for their emancipation of alternative qualities,
such as subjectivity, irregularity, contingency, unpredictability, uncertainties,
pathologies, and ambiguity. Indeed, such alternative value-attributions need
not be exclusive to “highbrow” art cinema. Furthermore, some individuals
may simply take pleasure in being overwhelmed by an artwork that surpasses
reason and cerebral comprehension. One may simply enjoy the sensation
of perplexity that such stories evoke, finding pleasure in the dazed states
of nonunderstanding, or in feeling the affective, nonconceptual sensations
afforded by a narrative that eludes cerebral comprehension. Arguably, the
quality of open-endedness in interpretation is generally also something that
is appreciated in our cultural apprehension of artworks. After all, artworks
that cannot be contained or exhausted in a single reading are generally held
in high esteem (in many forms of art criticism, or in the canons) where such
interpretive multistability is often considered an artistic asset that signals
a work’s depth or durability.
Secondly, viewers may also connect these qualities of interpretive
multiplicity to mimetic expressivity – that is, they may see the complexity
as mirroring aspects of the world in which we live, or the ways in which we
experience it. Some critics have argued that complex, unsolvable narratives
reflect the decentralized or diffuse postmodern culture, or the complexity
of contemporary socioeconomic problems. 4 It is assumed that there are
viewers who feel that artworks that evoke high complexity, dissonance, or
ambiguity as an effect (instead of merely depicting these conditions in their
stories) do a better job at representing the inherent complexity or ambiguity
of the human condition or the world around us. Moreover, films, such as
Mulholland Drive or Enemy (2013) may likewise be appreciated for the
reason that they do justice to the complexities of the human mind, finding
ways of representing the (anti)logic of dreams or the subconscious strata
of the human psyche. In this sense, impossible and unresolvable puzzles
may be attributed mimetic functions that can be characterized as rather
existential. Jan Alber eloquently phrases such a position when pondering the
appeal of “unnatural” fiction (physically, logically, or humanly impossible
stories) that resists meaning-making:

At the end of the day, all examples of unnaturalness can be read as saying
something about us and the world we live in. […] For me the unnatural
addresses one fundamental aspect of our being in the world: the lack
of order and meaning and the difficulties of coming to terms with this
60 Stories

lack. […] The unnatural […] reminds us of the fact that we are never fully
in control of things: represented impossibilities challenge the search for
order and meaning in a radical way. At the same time, however, it is of
course our human predicament not just to stare into this abyss but also
to try to come to terms with it. (2016, 36-37)

This also points toward a third possible component behind the attractive-
ness of this type of hermeneutic play, namely training a real-world skill for
dealing with interpretive multiplicity. If the everyday world is complex
and characterized by a lack of clear order and meaning, then it follows that
dealing with the multiplicity and multistability of different meanings forms
a key aspect of dealing with that world. In connecting strategies formulated
for fictional complexity to the ability to cope with real-world complexity,
Ien Ang has called for the nurturing of a kind of “cultural intelligence”:

Finding a language to understand […] complexities – that is, to describe

the specific ways in which things are “complex and contradictory” […] – is
a necessary step to generate the cultural intelligence with which to for-
mulate “solutions” in terms of strategic, flexible, emergent, non-simplistic
simplifications, rather than the reductionist and mechanistic thinking
(informed by positivism) which still dominates much policy-making and
problem-solving. (2011, 788-789)

Artworks can exercise our ability to cope with complex situations in real
life by presenting complex stories or by foregrounding formal-structural
complexity that requires viewers to juggle multiple, simultaneously rea-
sonable interpretive options. The tendency of impossible puzzle films to
withhold closure and unambiguous meaning can also be seen in this light.
These films may, for instance, train viewers in what Reuven Tsur has labeled
negative capability. Tsur quotes Keats to characterize negative capability
as a competence “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason” (1975, 776). This stands in opposi-
tion to what Tsur calls the “quest for certitude”: the urge to distill singular,
unambiguous meaning from an artwork and reach interpretive closure.
These notions form two poles in a spectrum, ranging from the appreciation of
fixedness and certitude to the valuing of lingering ambiguity and interpretive
multiplicity. One may assume that a viewer’s position on this spectrum will
be determined by personal attributes and dispositions (cf. an individual’s
psychological “need for closure” – see Webster and Kruglanski 1994), and
that this position is relevant in the degree to which one enjoys or values
Wallowing in Dissonance  61

ambiguous artworks. Nonetheless, it can be hypothesized that repeated

exposure to narrative artworks that highlight interpretive multistability may
serve to train everyday “negative capability.” By altering the shortcuts in an
individual’s meaning-making routines, repeated exposure to interpretive
multiplicity may make him or her less prone to readily seeking interpretive
closure.
Lastly, even if complex films do not necessarily form “cognitive play-
grounds” in which viewers can train and test the meaning-making skills
demanded by an increasingly complex world, then they can still be said
to simply entertain skills that viewers already possess. That is, complex
stories can trigger the use of certain interpretive and analytical mental
competences, which viewers may enjoy exercising simply for their own sake.
Following Liesbeth Korthals Altes, we could call this aesthetic pleasure
Funktionslust. According to her, there seems to be a:

pleasure and interest our minds seem to take in complexity itself, admit-
tedly in different degrees. This pleasure seems akin to what the German
psychologist Karl Bühler called Funktionslust. This eloquent term refers
to the pleasure taken in exercising a mental or bodily function (Bühler
1965, 157). Such function-oriented pleasure can be observed in repetitive
movements in animal and child play but also in adult behaviour, from a
good physical workout to riddles or crosswords that engage the pleasure
of puzzling and pattern-seeking minds. (2014, 23; our emphases)

An impossible narrative puzzle may provide viewers with a similar pleasure

by entertaining their Funktionslust in repeatedly utilizing their analytical
and interpretive abilities. Complexity of narrative form, Korthals Altes
notes, is particularly likely to become the target of such enjoyment, as “the
pleasure we may take in our skillfulness in understanding intricate form may
also appear like the Funktionslust of puzzling and pattern-seeking minds”
(2014, 131). To a degree, however, this could of course be said of aesthetic
and narrative engagement in general. The idea that emerges here is akin to
a more general Kantian view of aesthetics, also popular among cognitive
theorists of art, which assumes that part of the gratification of art lies in the
fact that it affords a free play of our cognitive-perceptual and imaginative
abilities in the absence of direct purposefulness. As David Bordwell notes:

In our culture, aesthetic activity deploys such [everyday cognitive] skills

for nonpractical ends. In experiencing art, instead of focusing on the
pragmatic results of perception, we turn our attention to the very process
62 Stories

itself. What is nonconscious in everyday mental life becomes consciously

attended to. Our schemata get shaped, stretched, and transgressed; a delay
in hypothesis-confirmation can be prolonged for its own sake. And like
all psychological activities, aesthetic activity has long-range effects. Art
may reinforce, or modify, or even assault our normal perceptual-cognitive
repertoire. (1985, 32)

In this respect, too, impossible puzzle films can be seen as having rather
unique reflexive functions. Through their problematization of narrative
construction, as well as through their interpretive challenges, these films
can have viewers experience and reflect on their cognitive involvement
in narrative construction or, more generally, on different sense-making
processes (perceptual, narrative, interpretive). Engaged viewers’ repeated
attempts to come to terms with the inherent dissonances of these stories
may afford a gratifying Funktionslust in the pattern-seeking and other
puzzle-solving activities of their hermeneutic play.

Orientation, Navigation, and Mapping

Besides affording hermeneutic play, impossible puzzle films may also chal-
lenge other everyday cognitive skills and activities. One idea we wish to
propose is that impossible puzzle films could provide special (embodied-)
cognitive experiences by challenging one’s real-life skills of orientation and
navigation. Our hypothesis is that the pressure that such challenges exert
on these skills might be a source of an enhanced viewer engagement. This
first requires some explanation about the general function of orientation
and navigation in relation to narrative fiction.
Elsewhere, we argued that real-life skills pertaining to everyday, em-
bodied orientation and navigation are relevant to the processes involved in
comprehending narrative structures (see Kiss and Willemsen 2017, 91-103;
or Kiss 2013, 2015). Following previous accounts of embodied psychological
and narrative continuity (Slors 1998; Menary 2008), we drew a link between
the abilities of real-world orientation and navigation and analytical skills
of plot segmentation in narrative comprehension.5 We hypothesized that
viewers use basic spatial schemas in “mapping” narrative plot structures, for
instance, through the mental projection of image schemas, or by mapping
one’s own familiar action patterns onto the experiential paths of the fictional
characters. This claim considers the idea that viewers and readers “map”
a story to be more than just a metaphor and that “mapping” is therefore
Wallowing in Dissonance  63

not tied to strictly topographic dimensions.6 For instance, when viewers

follow and trace stories by means of narrative plotting, mapping can involve
spatial visualizations of temporal relations among events (by placing them
on a mental timeline). Arguably, readers and viewers are willing to invest
cognitive resources into creating mental models of narrative maps if their
investment presumably contributes to their comprehension of a story.
The challenges of (impossible) puzzle films seem to provide a cognitive
playground that particularly encourages such mapping activity in one’s
narrative orientation.
Similar to real-world navigation, in fictional worlds, the absence of a
clear reference point can lead to disorientation. This reference point can be
characterized as the deictic center. In everyday navigation, the deictic center
refers to the embodied ego-reference point from which we navigate space
and monitor time (establishing dimensions, such as front, back, up, down,
or before and after). When extended to narrative, the notion denotes our
constructions of “where we are” in the story, referring to the constructed
spatiotemporal coordinates of “here and now.” In any narrative text or film,
this deictic center is an essential feature of storytelling and the starting
point from which we can make inferences about the film’s narrative and
visual markers (or a written text’s grammatical indications) concerning the
when, where, and who of the story.
In constructing a narrative plot, the deictic center positions the characters
relative to the spatiotemporal progression of the storyline, advancing along
with the unfolding narrative. This allows viewers to determine “where they are”
in the story, and enables them to determine not only the “here and now” but
also, for instance, what is a flashback to earlier or flash forward to upcoming
events. In most narratives, the deictic center is communicated clearly, provid-
ing a backbone for the smooth integration of narrative information: we know
where we are in a story and can map flashbacks, flash forwards, changes of
scenes, and ellipses in relation to that point in space and time. In impossible
puzzle films, however, determining a clear deictic center may become problem-
atic, or even prove virtually impossible, as the result of palpable dissonances
between cognitions or sheer lack of order. This is particularly evident with
narratives that present impossible storyworlds such as parallel universe stories
(that obscure the spatiotemporal hierarchy among their multiple realities),
and/or use complex nonchronological storytelling structures, particularly
loops (which can severely destabilize a clear determination of the “here and
now” or the “beginning and end”). We hypothesize that impossible puzzle
films can disorient viewers by either denying the designation of a clear deictic
center, or by asking them to map the story from multiple deictic centers.
64 Stories

As for the first option, many impossible puzzle films challenge orientation
by hiding or obscuring the deictic center, leaving a high degree of uncertainty
about the status of narrative information. It may, for instance, be left unclear
as to whether scenes belong to the past, present, or future, or are a part of
someone’s hallucinations or dreams about the past, present, or future. One
may, for instance, think of the extensive sections in Mulholland Drive
in which the film delves into a mysterious variety of uncanny scenes and
storylines (including those of the Hollywood director, his casting and the
mobsters, the nightmare story at the Winkie’s diner, the cowboy, the hitman,
as well as the ongoing story of Betty and Rita). While the film spirals into
these different nonchronologically organized and ambiguously focalized
story paths, it becomes increasingly difficult for a viewer to establish how
events relate to one another, or how scenes might be connected – either spa-
tially, temporally, causally, or as a network. The film does not follow a single
character who could have provided a navigable reference point through the
succession of different scenes and settings; nor does Mulholland Drive
include other clear spatial or temporal markers by which events could
be readily placed in relation to one another. Moreover, the few recurring
characters, such as Betty and Rita, who could embody a focal(izing) center
point around which these events revolve, seem to have slippery identities as
well, which further riddles the story with contradictions and incoherency.
As the film progresses, this continuous lack of a clear center of orientation,
from which the story’s dimensions could be mapped (for example, as past or
present, or as a dream or reality) frustrates the engaged viewer’s attempts
to do so. The strategy of making a deictic reference point permanently
elusive is arguably paramount to Mulholland Drive’s complex effects
and, along with the film’s highly uncanny and estranging film style, leads
to a palpable sense of disorientation.
With regard to the second option, impossible puzzle films frequently
present multiple (sometimes contradictory or paradoxical) deictic centers
from which the plot needs to be mapped. This is particularly apparent
in narratives that feature time loops and/or duplicating characters, as in
Primer, Triangle, Timecrimes (2007), Miraq (2006), or Reality (2014).
In the convoluted time-travel logic of Primer, for instance, the multiplying
– and, for the viewer, often indistinguishable – versions of the protagonists
destabilize our ability to map the past, present, and future, because these
versions all form different, simultaneously existing deictic centers which
are active at different points on the film’s timeline. As various incarnations
of the protagonists coexist within a single looping structure, the film’s
spatiotemporal markers become increasingly dislocated.
Wallowing in Dissonance  65

Fig. 4.1: Plot map of Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007), drawn by Miklós Kiss.

The effect of an intensified need for orientation in complex story com-

prehension can also be observed in viewers’ attempts to graphically map
such plots. Drawing physical maps can function as a kind of “prosthetic
extension” of viewers’ mental work. A physical map can unburden limited
cognitive resources and working memory when coping with complex stories
and plots. Visual maps of narratives might also reveal neglected clues,
new semantic fields, overlooked relations and patterns, and other forms
of internal logic, which otherwise could have escaped one’s awareness (for
example, the plot map of Timecrimes reveals a simple structure behind
the complex experience – Fig. 4.1).7
We would not claim that these films’ challenging of deeply engrained
skills of orientation and navigation is attractive in itself. However, such
complexifying narrative tactics can be seen as invitational strategies that
encourage heightened viewer activity, and thereby even manage to pull some
viewers into playing along with the puzzle-solving games of navigational
challenge, and mentally or even graphically mapping the intricate plot at
hand, as the abundance of available online plot maps of complex films
demonstrates. Inspiring such augmented analytical and interpretive activi-
ties, movies, especially of the complex kind, often provide models for such
mapping practices themselves: from Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future
Part II (1989) through Mennan Yapo’s Premonition (2007) to Timecrimes,
many films present pensive characters chalking diagrams or grabbing pen
and paper (see Fig. 4.2 to 4.4, respectively).
66 Stories

Fig. 4.2: Drawing on a blackboard, Doctor Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) explains the
consequences of time travel in Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future Part II (1989).

Fig. 4.3: In Mennan Yapo’s Premonition (2007) Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) draws a calendar to be
able to reconstruct a week she experiences in a nonchronological order.

Fig. 4.4: A quick sketch that reveals the simple idea behind a complex film experience in Nacho
Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007), drawn by El Joven (played by Vigalondo himself).
Wallowing in Dissonance  67

Game Logic and the Fascination with Failure

Another hypothesis to explain the popularity of contemporary puzzle films

can be sought in the comparison between their viewing experiences and
the logic of videogames. According to Jason Mittell, many contemporary
complex narratives:

require the audience to learn the particular rules of a film to comprehend

its narrative; movies like The Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Memento,
The Usual Suspects, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind, and Run Lola Run have all embraced a game aesthetic, inviting
audiences to play along with the creators to crack the interpretive codes
to make sense of their complex narrative strategies. But crucially, the goal
of these puzzle films is not to solve the mysteries ahead of time; rather, we
want to be competent enough to follow their narrative strategies but still
relish in the pleasures of being manipulated successfully. (2006, 37-38)

Similarly, Elliot Panek notes that:

An element of non-filmic interactive storytelling exists in these [puzzle]

f ilms. Younger audiences that are increasingly comfortable with the
burgeoning interactive medium of video games may find puzzle narratives
appealing for this reason. It is not enough to say that these characters are
mentally unstable and that when the narration diverges from the classical
mode, it is merely reflecting their fractured look on life. We seem to seek
the nature of the instability even when we realize we are watching a
psychological puzzle film, and take pleasure in trying to figure out the
rules of the narration that presents the story to us. (2006, 87)

According to Warren Buckland, the narrative logic of contemporary puzzle

films can be traced to the emerging logic of new media, specifically of
videogames (see his analysis of Duncan Jones’s 2011 film Source Code in
Buckland 2014b, 185-197). For him, the influence can be observed in puzzle
films’ promise of “reliable rules” – a characteristic that is central to the logic
of videogames (Gottschalk 1995):

These rules, which are reliable in that they are systematic and unambigu-
ous […] constitute the video game’s environment, or location, which is not
restrained by the laws of the physical world. The game user can experience
video pleasure primarily by attempting to master these rules – that is,
68 Stories

decipher the game’s logic. Moreover, the desire to attain mastery makes
video games addictive, which at times can lead to the user’s total absorp-
tion into the game’s rules and environment. (Buckland 2014b, 187)

Although we believe a fundamental caution should be maintained with

regard to claims crossing over from different media (film is, after all, still
a noninteractive medium according to most definitions of interactivity),
Mittell’s, Panek’s and Buckland’s observations offer an interesting angle.
Indeed, we would agree that in highly complex films, viewers do not simply
experience complexity and dissonance, but are also often inclined to try
to understand the underlying logic thereof – in Panek’s words, to “seek the
nature of the instability.” In many cases, this does indeed involve attempts
to discern a set of logical rules in the narration – rules that the viewer could
ultimately master. However, as previously noted, impossible puzzle films do
not seem to offer the “reward” usually associated either with puzzle films
or with games (in the forms of a revealing twist, resolution or outcome, or
in the reaching of a new level). Some films do not simply delay the viewer’s
access to the rules and logic that govern their narration, but sometimes
even fully deny viewers such logic. Nonetheless, this does not need to make
the game-logic analogy invalid for these films. There are two reasons for
this. Firstly, we observed that complex stories such as impossible puzzle
films often seem designed to keep viewers inclined to search for a logic to
their stories, employing various (post)classical storytelling strategies that
encourage such “classical” narrative engagement (Kiss and Willemsen 2017,
163-182). Viewers may therefore still find in these films the “promise of
reliable rules” that Gottschalk and Buckland observe in games and cinematic
puzzles. Secondly, it seems that failure forms an intrinsic, even pleasurable
part of any gaming activity. As impossible puzzle films often evoke in viewers
unsuccessful attempts to grasp their stories and story logic, a certain sense
of “failure” also seems to characterize their experiences. An explanation
for the appeal of such viewing effects could be found in humans’ seemingly
paradoxical fascination with failure. Regarding impossible fictional worlds,
Umberto Eco already identified such appeal as “the pleasure of our logical
and perceptual defeat” ([1990] 1994, 77). But what is pleasurable about a
cognitive and perceptual defeat? In his book on videogames (tellingly titled
The Art of Failure), Danish ludologist, Jesper Juul, points out the initially
somewhat counterintuitive fact that “players prefer games in which they
fail” (2013, 2). Drawing from his own experience, Juul notes that “I dislike
failing in games, but I dislike not failing even more” (2). By means of some
elegantly simple experiments, Juul demonstrates the importance of failure
Wallowing in Dissonance  69

and feelings of inadequacy in the context of videogames. He observes that

“players who completed the game without failing gave it a lower rating
than those who failed at least once” (35), and that “players rated the game
significantly higher when they felt responsible for failure than when they
did not” (53-54).
Juul’s observations seem to rhyme with the psychological workings of
impossible puzzle films. Comparable to how a game “promises us that we
can remedy the problem if we keep playing” (7), impossible puzzle films
may beguile viewers with a similar promise, as their highly complex (but
seemingly logical) narration continuously encourages viewers to rationalize
and narrativize the illogical. The prospect of the potential intelligibility of
these films inspires viewers to keep trying to overcome their felt inadequacy
– which, as Juul notes with regard to games, is “an inadequacy that they
produce in us in the first place” (7). By arousing a sense of inadequacy, impos-
sible puzzle films seem to trigger a similar motivational bias: viewers may
feel that their competence or intelligence is being challenged in cracking the
puzzle, and therefore give in to the urge to overcome “their” failure through
recurring attempts at problem solving. To capture this recurring aspect
of the process in gaming, Juul (2013, 60) introduces a model of the failure-
improvement cycle of videogame play. The cycle consists of four steps: (1) a
new goal is introduced; (2) failure presents the player as inadequate; (3) the
player searches for the cause of the failure and improves; and (4) the player is
no longer inadequate; he or she has new skills. A similar mechanism seems
to be active in impossible puzzle film viewing, with the key difference being
that the required “improvement” may not be satisfyingly reached. Rather,
viewers’ ongoing lack of understanding and constant feeling of inadequacy
may become a driving force that keeps them invested in comprehending the
story, and, eventually, might contribute to their evaluating the experience
as engaging. In sum, this hypothesis assumes that the engaging potential of
impossible puzzle films is partly managed by strategies that continuously
challenge viewers’ feeling of competence, which can contribute to the
framing of the failure in achieving full comprehension as a fascinating
experience.

Effort Justification

Related to our fascination with failure, another possible reason for the
attraction of confusing and cognitively demanding narrative experiences
could be sought in the psychological principle of effort justification. In social
70 Stories

psychology, effort justification is understood as an everyday cognitive

dissonance-reduction strategy – a mode of changing the value of existing
cognitions. Simply put, the principle states that people tend to evaluate an
outcome, reached goal, or completed task as being more valuable when this
outcome has cost them more effort to achieve. It has been suggested that this
principle is active in many different social and behavioral patterns. It can, for
example, help to explain phenomena such as hazing and initiation rituals:
by having to go through hardships or having to make an effort to be allowed
into a social group, an individual is likely to value this membership more
highly, as he or she has to justify the effort made (attaching a higher value
to the outcome reduces the dissonance with regard to the more unpleasant
aspects of the experience). Drawing on Leon Festinger’s original theory of
cognitive dissonance (1957), a classic study by Elliot Aronson and Judson
Mills (1959) connected varying amounts of effort to evaluative judgments.
Aronson and Mills hypothesized that the effort justification mechanism
could be effective in any basic set of conditions regarding effort and evalu-
ation: “For example, one would expect persons who travel a great distance
to see a motion picture to be more impressed with it than those who see
the same picture at a neighborhood theater” (1959, 177).
Cognitive scientist, Jim Davies (2014), extends the principle of effort
justification to the realm of meaning-making. For him, discerned mean-
ing becomes more valuable if it is attained through substantial cognitive
effort. According to Davies, the pleasure of puzzles can also be related to
this principle; after all, “[w]ith puzzles, the audience gets to appreciate so
many things: the initial incongruity, the pleasure of knowing the solution,
the pride of having discovered it themselves, and an increased value of the
found solution due to idea effort justification” (2014, 143).
But how does this translate to an impossible puzzle? What is the mental
payoff of the perpetually challenging experience that impossible puzzle
films sometimes provide? It is apparent that the narrative comprehension of
these films demands significantly more cognitive efforts than most classical
stories or “ordinary” puzzle films (which provide or allow a relatively easy
access to a coherent and logical solution to their conundrum). As elsewhere
noted (Kiss and Willemsen 2017, 104-139), impossible puzzle films allow
cognitive operations and interpretive strategies that can compensate for
viewers’ fruitless efforts to find a coherent and logical solution. We would
therefore hypothesize that Aronson and Mills’s “suffering-leading-to-liking”
thesis (Gerard and Mathewson 1966) can play a role in the appreciation of
more pervasively complex films as well: attributing a positive judgment to
these films’ rich affordances might tame the experienced dissonance with
Wallowing in Dissonance  71

regard to the effort made. Simply put, one could presume that the general
principle of effort justification still holds true for films that do not necessarily
offer narrative closure or a satisfying resolution. According to this, the appeal
of impossible puzzle films may stem from these films’ offered analytical and
interpretive richness, the intensified inspiration for forensic activities their
puzzles call forth, and from viewers’ general respect for a highly challenging
experience that seems to outsmart them. These hypotheses could make for
an interesting subject in terms of further empirical investigations.

Diegetization of Decoupling

According to cultural cognitivist, Barend van Heusden, the appeal of

cognitively dissonant narrative art comes from the amplification of a very
general human disposition – one that characterizes practically all our real-
life and mediated narrative experiences (Van Heusden 2009; and personal
correspondence). He reasons that cognitively dissonant scenarios make us
reexperience the act of decoupling, which is not only an integral part of our
cognition but also a core aspect of the general human condition.
As Merlin Donald has argued (1991, 2006), through the evolutionarily
increased capacities of working memory, humans have become capable of
decoupling memory from actuality:

Donald equates the origins of modern humans to a transition from epi-

sodic to mimetic cultures, or the transition from lives that are bounded
to the immediacy of experience to lives that are lived not only in the
present but also in the simulation or representation of this experience.
(Rochat [2001] 2004, 73)

In this sense, the act of decoupling is the source of human imagination:

being able to “decouple” from the actuality of our here-and-now experience
enables us to simulate, represent, or even fantasize about alternative versions
of our reality. Following this train of thought, decoupling allows mimesis,
whereas “art is an inevitable by-product of mimesis” (Donald 2006, 14).
Hence, as a result of the cognitive evolution of the human species and its
developed capacity for decoupling, the nature of culture and the experience
of mimetic art fundamentally bear elements of dissonance. This means that
there is a fundamental, deep-seated (yet unconscious and rarely reflected)
conflict between our actual and imagined experience: between the “here
and now” of actual perception (the reality context of reading or viewing,
72 Stories

that is, our reality as real readers and viewers) and the “there and then”
virtual domain of narrative immersion (the diegetic world and its fictive
population, which form the destination of our absorption and embodied
identification). This “cognitive dissonance” is a result of the transfer from
our real-life existence to the mediated art experience.8
If art is the mimetic imitation of an experience through representation
by mediated simulation, then “metarepresentation” is a reflection on art’s
mimetic representation. Certain metarepresentational cinematic strategies
may highlight the cognitive dissonance inherent to the experience of artistic
representation. Films can thematize and manifest the act of decoupling
through narrative diegetization of this very fundamental dissonance. A
notable example of this is provided by the abundance of character duplica-
tions in impossible puzzle films. Character splitting, doubling, and multi-
plication provide powerful instances of the diegetization of decoupling’s
inherent dissonance. Looping narratives’ character multiplications – such
as in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976), Smith’s Triangle, Vigalondo’s
Timecrimes, the Spierig brothers’ Predestination (2014), or Lynch’s Lost
Highway – allow us to literally reexperience the underlying dissonance
between our double presence of “here and now” and immersed “being there,”
which can be seen as a subtle addition to these films’ attractiveness (beyond,
and in case of Polanski’s film, prior to the more obvious effects of digital
lossless copying, video games’ multiple lives, social media avatars, and other
distinctly contemporary reasons that scholars and critics have attributed
to the character-doubling “trend”).9

Fascination with Infinity

Certain impossible puzzle films owe part of their attraction to the arousal of
what seems to be a deeply rooted human fascination with infinity. Whether
encountered via mathematics or geometry, cosmology, or theology, the idea
of endlessness seems to exert a strong curiosity, detectable throughout
Western cultural history and the arts (Maor 1987). Like mathematicians,
visual artists have repeatedly attempted to capture infinity in an aesthetic
form, for instance through endlessly looping patterns (comparable to the
famous steps by Lionel and Roger Penrose [1958] – Fig. 4.5) or recursive
mise-en-abymes (a picture of a picture in a picture in a picture – suggesting
multiplication ad infinitum). Some impossible puzzle films similarly suggest
“inf inity,” presenting narrative versions of inf inite loops (for example,
Triangle and Timecrimes) or endless narrative mise-en-abymes through
Wallowing in Dissonance  73

Fig. 4.5: The impossible loop of Penrose Steps by Lionel and Roger Penrose (1958).

embedded metalepses (for example, Reality and Synecdoche, New York,

2008). These peculiar “endless” narrative structures seem to exert a curious
fascination.
Why is it that pondering “the infinite” is prone to evoking reactions of
wonder or bewilderment? In a 1994 paper, psychologist, Ruma Falk, discusses
how infinity seems to be “infinitely challenging to the human mind” (35).
She notes that “people’s intellectual attempts to cope with the puzzles posed
by the infinite have been interwoven with a wide spectrum of emotional
responses” (35). According to her, these emotions and fascinations are
essentially triggered by the human inability to cope with the “disturbing
contradictions” that endlessness entails (36). This inability, Falk argues, is
grounded in two particular cognitive moves – neither of which is compatible
with our habitual strategies of reasoning. Firstly, in order to grasp infinity,
one needs to practice “the ability to suppress our imagination, at least the
visual part of it” (54). This entails a conscious detachment from everyday
experience and knowledge, common sense and the habitual formation of
mental imagery, all of which imply (and depend upon) finiteness in the world
around us. Therefore, coming to terms with infinity demands the challenge
of “unlearning of old truisms” about the laws and dimensions of the world
in which we live (53). Secondly, according to Falk, the infinite will always
remain an abstraction – a concept that is beyond the reach of human experi-
ence and intuition, and that is best explained by scientific conceptualization.
Like quantum mechanics, infinity proves very difficult to comprehend in
74 Stories

terms of the realm of everyday experience, yet its workings can ultimately
be understood through (scientific) argumentation and description. Falk
illustrates this by referring to examples of so-called “super-task problems,”
borrowed from mathematical and psychological experiments: she asserts
that as long as one tries to reconcile puzzles about the infinite rationally
and commonsensically, they will elicit “bizarre conclusions” (55). Hence,
Falk argues:

No real-life experiment can ever model the infinite. […] Paradoxically,

one needs a kind of (non-visual) vision that can accept the unimaginable.
The key to abstract thought is its detachment, not only from sensory
perception, but even from imagery. Dissociation from familiar aspects of
reality and from strongly held beliefs may enable human understanding
to surpass intuition. (1994, 37, 54)

Arguably, inf inity derives its fascinating aesthetic potential from this
challenging of familiar aspects of our (beliefs about) reality. Illustrations
such as the Penroses’ infinite steps or Escher’s paradox loops (such as his
1959-1960 lithograph Ascending and Descending) are examples of attempts
“to capture infinity in a ‘closed’ composition” (Schattschneider [1990] 2005,
241).10 We have compared the narrative structures of impossible puzzle
films to depictions such as Escher’s (Kiss and Willemsen 2017, 86-91), noting
how these films also make the seemingly impossible perceptually and
conceptually available. Some impossible puzzle films (not all, it must be
noted) play with narrative mechanisms that suggest “infinite” outcomes.
Films such as Triangle or The Tenant present stories that turn into endless
loops without beginnings or endings; Reality constructs a mise-en-abyme
in which different story levels are contained in one another, offering a
continuous paradox; and Synecdoche, New York plays with another kind
of mise-en-abyme, one that is implied through a constantly duplicating
simulacrum: as protagonist Caden wants to direct a play that honestly and
realistically captures his real, mundane life, he finds that his play must
also include him making the play, which then needs to include a play about
him making that play – a logic that ultimately points toward a potentially
infinite recursion of plays within plays within plays.
These examples all use circular structures and recursive multiplications as
narrative devices to suggest endlessly looping or duplicating diegetic realities.
Although such storyworlds exert a strong sense of “impossibility,” they are,
at the same time, presented as coherent, “inhabitable” and, up to a point,
imaginable. In their totality, however, potentially “infinite” story patterns
Wallowing in Dissonance  75

such as these indeed entail, as Falk noted, “disturbing contradictions” – or,

we would say, “dissonant cognitions”: they clash with common sense, reason,
and everyday experiential evidence. It seems that the challenge of coming
to terms with the infinite pushes the limits of our embodied and situated
cognition – which is not surprising, considering that our cognition emerges
in, and is directed at, a seemingly “finite” world (as our lived environment
is characterized by apparent physical boundaries and limitations). The
way in which infinity surpasses these everyday intuitions and defies our
imagination may therefore be experienced as engaging, uncanny, enthrall­
ing, or simply surprising. Some impossible puzzle films play on this effect,
suggesting infinity to further fuel the fascination that viewers find in the
narrative acrobatics and cognitive challenge of metalepses, loops, and other
intricately multiplying story patterns.

Destabilized Ontological Certainties

Metalepses in narrative fiction collapse fictional boundaries among embed-

ded narrative frames. While our fascination with infinity can be triggered
by simulating the possibility of endless multiplication of embedded levels
in a story (that is, stories within stories), metaleptic transgressions work
by breaking the boundaries between story levels, often playing with the
odd option of extending the fictional to the real (for example, real writers
appearing in their fictional stories). Complex films and impossible puzzle
films, we hypothesize, often seem to use such “ontological metalepses” to
arouse uncanny, potentially intriguing emotional and intellectual effects.
Contemporary complex films frequently employ ontological metalepses
to present fictional transgressions between their diegetic and embedded
hypodiegetic story levels. Examples may include Marc Forster’s Stranger
Than Fiction (2006), in which Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) becomes aware
that he is a fictional character in a still-developing book of an author, with
whom he even shares the narrative level; or Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002),
where the film’s real screenplay writer, Charlie Kaufman, writes himself
into his film script, which becomes the film that the viewer is watching.
A compelling literary case is provided by Julio Cortázar’s 1962 short story
The Continuity of Parks, wherein the protagonist appears to be threatened
by a character from a book he is reading.
Due to the logic that such porous narrative structures allow, ontological
metalepses may have the potential to awaken in readers or viewers a certain
“sense of logical unease” (Eco 1979, 234). Stories such as Cortázar’s collapse
76 Stories

very basic ontological boundaries – not only between different story layers,
but also between fictional and real-life levels of the experienced fiction
and experiencing context. As for the latter, the “ontologically threatening”
potential of metalepsis was acknowledged already in the theorizing of
Gérard Genette ([1972] 1980, 236). Genette quoted Jorge Luis Borges – himself
a master of narrative metalepses – who, being fascinated by such deep
ontological uncertainties, noted that “if the characters in a story can be
readers or viewers, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious”
([1960] 1964, 46). According to this, an ontological metalepsis might “amount
to a double catharsis, a representational and an existential one” (Meister
2003; our emphases).
Impossible puzzle films, with their tangled complexity and ambiguous
hierarchies among different levels and multiple plots, are especially prone to
arousing a certain ontological uncertainty in viewers. These films frequently
play with vague or transgressed boundaries between dream and reality, fic-
tion and real life, or telling and told. In a rare but registered effect, ontological
metalepses might even lead to a psychologically identified disorder that is
tellingly called the Truman Syndrome (Fusar-Poli et al. 2008), in which the
patient suffers from a delusion that his or her life is part of a fictional story,
staged as a play or reality show and controlled by unseen powers.11 Although
we would not want to claim that impossible puzzle films’ narrative tactics
instill such degrees of psychological (truly existential) anxiety in their
viewers, it is reasonable to assert that some playful metalepses are able to
set in motion the idea (and subsequent feelings) of ontological uncertainty,
adding to the fascination and perhaps appreciation of their ambiguous,
paradoxical, and dissonant experience while maintaining their stories’
stubborn mysteries.
Take, for instance, Adaptation’s playful destabilization of its view-
ers’ ontological positions and assumptions. The story revolves around a
fictionalized version of the actual screenplay writer, Charlie Kaufman. It
shows Kaufman’s (Nicolas Cage) struggle to adapt a book, and his decision
to write a film about this struggle, which turns out to be the film we are
watching. Director, Jonze, and screenwriter, Kaufman, not only play with
these transgressions within the film’s narrative levels (writer/written), but
further utilize the destabilizing potential of their metalepsis by allowing the
fiction to “leak” into the film’s paratextual and actual contexts: for example,
Adaptation’s credits mention Charlie Kaufman’s fictional brother from
the film, Donald Kaufman (also played by Nicolas Cage), as a cowriter of
the film’s real screenplay.12 Also, the film further plays with its own reality
status by including scenes about the making of Jonze and Kaufman’s previous
Wallowing in Dissonance  77

movie, Being John Malkovich (1999), as part of Adaptation’s fiction.

Such strategies not only obfuscate the relation between the adapted and
adaptation in the film, but also undercut viewers’ “uppermost” controlling
position regarding the fictional and the real. This involvement of the viewer
through an ultimate metaleptic pop can be seen as a device that heightens
this kind of cinema’s engaging capacity, making viewers part of the film’s
complex game.

Eudaimonic Motivations and Intrinsic Needs

Above, we characterized the attractiveness of confusing stories as somewhat

“paradoxical.” Similar to the well-known sadness-paradox in art and media
studies which says that people willingly engage with artworks that evoke
negative emotions, such as sadness, that they would normally avoid, one
encounters what resembles a “confusion-paradox”: it seems that in narrative
art and fiction, the negative valence of being confused can be considered
enjoyable. However, as we hope to have demonstrated, highly complex
movies are also capable of engaging and fascinating viewers in a variety of
ways. How, then, should this “paradox of the confusion-paradox” be resolved?
One way of escaping the confusion-paradox is by emphasizing the so-called
eudaimonic motivations that viewers may have for engaging with fiction. In
addressing the issue of negative emotions in art, media psychologists, Mary
Beth Oliver and Arthur A. Raney, have argued that “people consume media
entertainment in the pursuit of pleasure and amusement (hedonic motiva-
tions) and as part of their general need to search for and ponder life’s meaning,
truths, and purposes – motivations that we characterize as ‘eudaimonic’”
(2011, 985; our emphases). Indeed, the attraction to highly complex stories
becomes less paradoxical if one drops the (arguably erroneous) assumption
that the engagement with fiction should be conceived of as only “hedonically”
motivated – that is, strictly in terms of bringing “entertaining pleasure.”
Most of the hypotheses developed in this chapter concern cognitive and
interpretive reflections that are better characterized as driven by eudaimonic
motivations (reflection, truth-seeking, or self-development) than as strictly
hedonically motivated. However, postulating a distinction between “hedonic”
and “eudaimonic” drives still implies a basic difference between “fun” and
“meaningful” experiences that seems problematic. After all, can hedonic
pleasures not be found in the gratification of eudaimonic concerns as well?
Having the same dilemma, Ron Tamborini and his colleagues (2010)
suggested that it would be better to approach eudaimonic motivations for
78 Stories

media consumption in relation to the satisfaction of people’s intrinsic needs.

In conceptualizing these “intrinsic needs,” the researchers used Edward L.
Deci and Richard M. Ryan’s self-determination theory (1985). This seminal
theoretical model assumes three basic psychological needs in individuals,
namely autonomy, competence, and relatedness:

autonomy [is] a sense of volition or willingness when doing a task (Deci

and Ryan 2000); competence [is] a need for challenge and feelings of
effectance (Deci 1975); and relatedness [is] a need to feel connected with
others (Ryan and Deci 2001). (Tamborini et al. 2010, 761)

While working with experiments involving a videogame, the researchers

confirmed the role of these needs in relation to media consumption. Yet they
also noted that there is “no basis to believe that our definition of enjoyment as
the satisfaction of needs is limited to video games” (771). Therefore, our final
hypothesis concerns the enjoyment and engagement of impossible puzzle
films in light of these intrinsic psychological needs. We would suggest that
the attractiveness of complex films should not be seen as strictly hedonic
(pleasurable or entertaining) or merely eudaimonic reflections (ponder-
ing life’s complexities or achieving personal development), but should be
understood as appealing to viewers’ psychological intrinsic needs. For some
people, impossible puzzle films may resonate with their need for autonomy
(as the interpretive freedom and playfulness of these films leave a relatively
high amount of choice and authority to the individual viewer), or may be a
means to establish relatedness (for instance, through collective forensic fan
activities, or the social rewards of sharing of interpretations, plot maps, or
explanatory videos online). Yet the key concept in terms of the enjoyment
of impossible puzzle films seems to lie in the notion of competence. On
the basis of the above hypotheses and arguments, we contend that highly
complex films – by challenging and entertaining a variety of cognitive,
analytical, and interpretive skills – engage viewers by appealing to their
intrinsic need for competence and effectance.13 Whether it is about finding
an interpretation that works, grasping a story’s intricate mechanisms, dealing
with ontological uncertainties, or mapping a plot, enjoying these films
usually entails engaging in simulated challenges that playfully (and safely)
address viewers’ need to feel competent and skilled.14 As Jason Mittell noted,
viewers of complex narratives “relish in the pleasures of being manipulated”
but, ultimately, “want to be competent enough to follow their narrative
strategies” (2006, 38). The urge to “keep up” with a complex story arguably
tickles viewers’ self-esteem and engages their potential for effectance.
Wallowing in Dissonance  79

In conclusion to our study, we would propose that feeling “challenged”

by complex movies may be more important than solving their puzzles. In
this light, the success of impossible puzzle films can be seen as the result
of a narrative audacity that takes its viewers’ “empowered” positions into
consideration; these films dare to enduringly confuse viewers, and boldly
leave large chunks of the interpretive and analytical work up to their cogni-
tive and interpretive competences. The narrative and psychological pressures
on viewers to resolve dissonances and achieve comprehension make room
for all kinds of creative, intellectual, analytical, and interpretive skills and
processes. This, especially in a mainstream context, is quite novel, but, as
the trend proves, not inconceivable. Surely, our proposition presupposes
viewers’ resonance with this kind of cinema, and entails that varying degrees
of competency (in terms of film and media literacy) will form a key factor in
terms of their varying enjoyment of such highly complex films. In this sense,
impossible puzzle films may be seen as the product of a specific moment
in our media- and narrative-saturated time. Films such as these are able to
cognitively challenge and intellectually intrigue a number of viewers who
may have already grown accustomed to ever-increasing amounts and forms
of mediacy, narratives, and complication – whether in popular fiction or in
culture at large. Cinematic versions of impossible puzzles thereby seem to
reflect the larger cultural shifts behind their emergence: not only do they
appeal to a deep-seated human hunger to solve puzzles, they also embrace
our life’s complexities, providing enigmatic journeys into the impossible.

Notes

1. This contribution is an edited excerpt from the final chapter of the mono-
graph Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary
Complex Cinema (Kiss and Willemsen 2017, 183-207). We wish to express our
gratitude to Edinburgh University Press for granting us permission to use
this reprint.
2. This use of “cognitive dissonance” is not to be confused with this term’s
established sociopsychological meaning, which refers to the effect of
inconsistencies in an individual’s behaviors or beliefs in real-world situa-
tions (e.g., Cooper 2007; Stone 1999) and has also been used to describe, for
example attitudes toward fictional characters or situations (e.g., Caracciolo
2013; Van der Pol 2013). Although our use of the term “cognitive dissonance”
in narrative comprehension shares some similarities with the cognitive core
of Leon Festinger’s original theory (1957, 31, 13) and its suggestion of how
dissonances between cognitions elicit a pressure to resolve or deal with
80 Stories

the conflict, there are also significant differences (e.g., between fictional
and real-world situations, or between values and logical beliefs). A more
elaborate discussion of these differences and overlaps was included in our
original study (Kiss and Willemsen 2017, 67-70).
3. See also Nitzan Ben Shaul’s analysis (2012) of how many classical narrative
films induce a certain “close-mindedness” in viewers, whereas some films
do allow them the distinct pleasure of entertaining their ability for “op-
tional thinking,” for instance by offering alternative narrative paths among
which viewers can choose or imagine different possibilities.
4. For instance, cultural philosopher, Thijs Lijster (2014), proposes such a view
on the historical development of the detective/mystery genre. According to
Lijster, the detective fiction evolved from the celebration of Enlightenment
values and scientific reason (cf. Sherlock Holmes’s ever-successful use of
deductive logic and inference-making) to a genre riddled with paranoia,
labyrinth-like enigmas and mysteries that can no longer be solved or un-
derstood by a single detective (cf. Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson,
2014). Moreover, the detectives themselves became increasingly unreliable,
questionable, and flawed throughout twentieth-century fiction. For Lijster,
these shifts mirror the state of the (post)modern condition from which the
stories originate, such as the increasing cultural complexity and socio­
economic decentralization of our times.
5. For theoretical arguments (Johnson [1987] 1990; Slors 1998; Menary 2008)
and neuroscientific proofs (Gallese and Lakoff 2005), consult the previously
published article (Kiss 2013).
6. As for such topographic mapping, because “[p]eople read for the plot and
not for the map” (Ryan 2003, 238), it can be said that both film viewers and
“readers of print texts rarely maintain an ‘accurate map of spatial relations’
in the represented storyworld” (Ciccoricco 2007, 54). It is obvious that
the topographic practice of literary or visual cartography is a useful tool
for creative artists, but it is rarely triggered as a “natural” reader or viewer
response. Yet there is empirical proof that adult viewers encode a more or
less stable spatial layout “even when there is no explicit demand for them to
do so” (Levin and Wang 2009, 26).
7. The method of graphical extension of mental mapping might be imple-
mented in the creative practice of designing narrative experiences as well.
For instance, Christopher Nolan is known for making such sketches, as
revealed in the shooting script for his fairly complex film Inception (2010).
8. In Van Heusden’s words, since “[w]e do not live in, and reality does not
coincide with, our representations” (2009, 614), the possible awareness of
the fundamental difference between our experiential domains of “here and
now” reality and “there and then” simulation of this reality “seems to be
basic to human cognition” (614).
9. Beyond technology-fuelled allegories, character-duplication films such as
Enemy “[tap] into the root of our newfound doppelgänger obsession and
Wallowing in Dissonance  81

fear. Many of us are afraid that we’re simply not enough as we are – that
we’re not cool enough, pretty enough, passionate enough, or interesting
enough” (Wilkinson 2014).
10. Penrose and Penrose’s article in the British Journal of Psychology (1958)
featured the impossible staircase, which then, in fact, inspired Escher’s
Ascending and Descending (1960).
11. The term stems from the story of Truman Burbank, who unknowingly par-
ticipates in a reality television program in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show
(1998).
12. This even resulted in an Oscar nomination for “Charlie Kaufman and Don-
ald Kaufman” (for Best Adapted Screenplay), making Donald the first ever
entirely fictitious Oscar nominee.
13. Effectance is defined in organisational psychology as “the causal effect of an
object in the environment” (Nugent, Pam M.S., “EFFECTANCE,” Psychology-
Dictionary.org, April 7, 2013).
14. Of course, formally complex stories are not the only types of fiction that
play on this. For instance, in his 1991 model of mystery enjoyment, Dolf
Zillmann argued for the role of competence in all mystery fiction, noting
that “the enjoyment of certain forms of mystery is motivated by self-esteem
needs akin to competence” (Tamborini et al. 2010, 771). Although impos-
sible puzzle films do not offer coherent and explicit answers that much of
mystery fiction requires and provides (such as a clear answer to the “who-
dunit” question in detective stories), they do seem to tease a similar viewing
disposition.

References and Further Reading

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University of Nebraska Press.
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Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59, no. 2 (September): 177-181.
Ben Shaul, Nitzan. 2012. Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies. New York
and Oxford: Berghahn.
Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964 [1960]. Other Inquisitions 1937-1952. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Buckland, Warren. 2009. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
—. 2014a. Hollywood Puzzle Films. London: Routledge.
—. 2014b. “Source Code’s Video Game Logic.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, edited by Warren
Buckland, 185-197. London: Routledge.
Cameron, Allan. 2008. Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
82 Stories

Campora, Matthew. 2014. Subjective Realist Cinema: From Expressionism to Inception. New York
and Oxford: Berghahn.
Caracciolo, Marco. 2013. “Patterns of Cognitive Dissonance in Readers’ Engagement with
Characters.” Enthymema 8: 21-37.
Ciccoricco, David. 2007. Reading Network Fiction. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Coëgnarts, Maarten, Miklós Kiss, Peter Kravanja, and Steven Willemsen. 2016. “Seeing Yourself in
the Past: The Role of Situational (Dis)continuity and Conceptual Metaphor in the Understand-
ing of Complex Cases of Character Perception.” Projections 10, no. 1 (June): 114-138.
Cooper, Joel. 2007. Cognitive Dissonance. Fifty Years of Classic Theory. Los Angeles: Sage.
Cortázar, Julio. 2014 [1962]. “Continuity of Parks.” In Hopscotch; Blow-Up; We Love Glenda So
Much, translated by Gregory Rabassa and Paul Blackburn, 625-626. New York, London,
Toronto: Everyman’s Library.
Davies, Jim. 2014. Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and
Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deci, Edward L. 1975. Intrinsic Motivation. New York: Plenum Press.
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Human Behaviour. New York: Plenum.
—. 2000. “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of
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—. 2006. “Art and Cognitive Evolution.” In The Artful Mind. Cognitive Science and the Riddle of
Human Creativity, edited by Mark Turner, 3-20. New York: Oxford University Press.
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—. 1994 [1990]. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 13-41. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
—. 2018. “Contingency, Causality, Complexity: Distributed Agency in the Mind-Game Film.” New
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Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row.
Fusar-Poli, Paolo, Oliver Howes, Lucia Valmaggia, and Philip McGuire. 2008. “‘Truman Signs’ and
Vulnerability to Psychosis.” The British Journal of Psychiatry 193, no.2 (September): 167-169.
Gallese, Vittorio, and George Lakoff. 2005. “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor
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for a Group: A Replication.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2, no. 3 (July): 278-287.
Gottschalk, Simon. 1995. “Videology: Video-Games as Postmodern Sites/Sights of Ideological
Reproduction.” Symbolic Interaction 18, no. 1 (Spring): 1-18.
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Cognition 17, no. 3: 611-627.
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Reason. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
Juul, Jesper. 2013. The Art of Failure. An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Cambridge,
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Acta Film and Media Studies 5: 35-54.
Wallowing in Dissonance  83

—. 2013. “Navigation in Complex Films: Real-life Embodied Experiences Underlying Narrative

Categorisation.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd
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—. 2015. “Film Narrative and Embodied Cognition: The Impact of Image Schemas on Narrative
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43-61. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Kiss, Miklós, and Steven Willemsen. 2017. Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to
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Poetics Today 34, no. 1-2 (Spring/Summer): 119-146.
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Projections 3, no. 1: 24-52.
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63-84.
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5. “Storification”
Or, What Do We Want Psychology and Physiology to Tell
Us about Screen Stories?

Ian Christie
Every place has a story, and every story has a place.
– Krissy Clark (2010)

I recently took a party of visiting grandchildren to a city centre toy store as

a treat. As we waited in line for opening time, there was rising excitement.
Then the thrill of rushing in, and finding a section devoted to Ninjago sets
and their many spin-offs. An hour later, after weighing up options and
combinations, we left with a haul of Ninjago material. No question that in
the current world of four-to-seven year olds, Lego’s Ninjago rules; although
of course by the time you read this, there may be another emerging play/
product world to challenge its dominance.
The previous paragraph not only describes an actual observation of the
“power of story,” it also follows a widely recommended rule that to secure
attention, I should “tell a story,” and ideally one based on personal experience.
I could have started by observing that Lego’s Ninjago is one of the most suc-
cessful current entertainment franchises, selling model sets, costumes, games,
books, television, and film consumption. In short, a “story-world” that is also a
“product-world”; and moreover an excellent example of a “transmedial” world,
in which almost every medium accessible to a young person is mobilized
around a central theme, which is reduced to a single iconic name: Ninjago.
But in presenting my opening exhibit as I did, I am in fact following the
advice of neuroeconomist Paul Zak, who advises business people to “begin
every presentation with a compelling human-scale story” (2014). Straddling the
worlds of academic research and marketing, Zak recounts his core “discovery”:

A decade ago, my lab discovered that a neurochemical called oxytocin is a

key “it’s safe to approach others” signal in the brain. Oxytocin is produced
when we are trusted or shown a kindness, and it motivates cooperation
with others. It does this by enhancing the sense of empathy, our ability to
experience others’ emotions. Empathy is important for social creatures
because it allows us to understand how others are likely to react to a
situation, including those with whom we work. (2014)
86 Stories

There is in fact a large and diverse scientific literature on oxytocin and the
often exaggerated or simplified claims that have been made for its “effects.”
But Zak recounts a highly functional experiment:

we tested if narratives shot on video, rather than face-to-face interactions,

would cause the brain to make oxytocin. By taking blood draws before and
after the narrative, we found that character-driven stories do consistently
cause oxytocin synthesis. Further, the amount of oxytocin released by
the brain predicted how much people were willing to help others; for
example, donating money to a charity associated with the narrative. (2014)

Using more sophisticated experimental techniques, which involved monitor-

ing the oxytocin levels of a group of viewers watching a Bond film, Zak
concludes:

If the story is able to [create and sustain] tension then it is likely that at-
tentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters
in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and
behaviors of those characters. This explains the feeling of dominance
you have after James Bond saves the world, and your motivation to work
out after watching the Spartans fight in 300. (2014)

While such “findings on the neurobiology of storytelling” are offered for

use in “business settings,” I invoke them here to characterize the tenor of
recent research on spectatorship or viewer response.
Zak’s work referenced stereotypical fiction films to dramatize the lasting
emotional impact of film, no doubt on the basis of showing his subjects
short segments of the f ilms mentioned. A more focused experiment is
reported in another paper from his lab, making use of a specially created
short film:

Participants viewed a brief story of a father’s experience with his 2-year-old

son who has terminal cancer. After the story, participants were presented
with an opportunity to donate some of their study earnings to a related
charity. Measures derived from cardiac and electrodermal activity […]
significantly predicted donor status. […] Moreover, cardiac activity and
experienced concern were found to covary from moment-to-moment
across the narrative. Our findings indicate that the physiological response
to a stimulus, herein a narrative, can predict influence as indexed by
stimulus-related behavior. (Barraza et al. 2015)
“Storification” 87

Fig. 5.1: Zak’s story of Ben; behavioral outcomes from viewing a narrative created to test
bioemotional response.

More typical of such research is this measurable behavioral outcome. A

company that has specialized in developing tools for measuring bioemotional
response from physiological data, Filmtrip, now offers its Sensum platform
for use by advertising, “customer retail, ethnographic studies and augmented
focus groups.”1
We live in a world where stories and storytelling have been placed at the
center of vast areas of human activity – seemingly as the result of a wide-
spread cultural realization of “story” as a primordial form of engagement,
but often in the banal language of PR and commercialism. “Storification”
is a term widely used in education, as well as in new forms of journalism.2
But it is also the name of a Finnish company selling marketing techniques:

A story gives your service a red thread – a plot – that makes your service a
memorable experience. A story-designed service is easy and fun to sell. A
story-designed service is better; daring and different. It is an experience
that your customers understand and love. Tarinakone helps businesses
to create meaningful and touching customer experiences.3

While “stories” dominate our culture, the tools and methods for understand-
ing them have also proliferated exponentially since the end of the last
century. The period during which film studies was taking shape, roughly
88 Stories

the 1970s and 1980s, followed the emergence of a structuralist paradigm in

humanities – and indeed found considerable inspiration in this. Drawing
on the insights of mainly Russian scholars of the interwar years (Viktor
Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eikhenbaum), together with the archi-
tects of semiotics (Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Tzvetan
­Todorov), structuralism offered ways of analyzing the narrative structure of
a wide range of individual films, showing how these conformed to standard
patterns, as revealed in folklore by Propp or in nineteenth-century fiction
by Barthes. 4
However, this field can hardly be said to have developed, or even con-
tinued; so that the early classic studies of Christian Metz, François Jost,
Raymond Bellour, and Peter Wollen increasingly look like lonely monuments
to a once-imagined semiotic “science” of cinema. The question once was:
What can we learn from the knowledge that films conform to narrative
patterns discernible in other media? But now it is: What do we want to
understand “behind” or “beneath” the obvious facts of film and television’s
prolific storytelling. The spatial figures are perhaps significant, and could
indeed be supplemented with “around” screen storytelling and “story-
following.” Rather than study screen narrative texts in isolation, seeking
to understand their mechanics – and to discover their readers/viewers
“in” the text as was once fashionable (Browne 1975-1976, 26-38; Crofts and
Rose 1977, 9-60; Barker 2012, 187-205) – we are increasingly interested in
their contexts – of production, reception, intermediality, intertextuality.
Yet, at the same time, although in very different fields of research, there
has been immense progress during recent decades in understanding how
we as individuals, and as a species, “process” stories. This progress might
be categorized as either psychological or physiological, or more broadly
as “cognitive”; so that if there is a dominant paradigm of the twenty-first
century, an equivalent to structuralism, it is almost certainly “cognitivism.”
And an important subdomain within this is “cognitive narratology,” which
is defined by one of its leading exponents, David Herman, as: “the study of
mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices, wherever—and by whatever
means—those practices occur.” Herman casts the net wide in his definition:

cognitive narratology is transmedial in scope; it encompasses the nexus

of narrative and mind not just in print texts but also in face-to-face
interaction, cinema, radio news broadcasts, computer-mediated virtual
environments, and other storytelling media. In turn, “mind-relevance”
can be studied vis-à-vis the multiple factors associated with the design
and interpretation of narratives, including the story-producing activities
“Storification” 89

of tellers, the processes by means of which interpreters make sense of the

narrative worlds (or “storyworlds”) evoked by narrative representations or
artifacts, and the cognitive states and dispositions of characters in those
storyworlds. In addition, the mind-narrative nexus can be studied along
two other dimensions, insofar as stories function as both (a) a target of
interpretation and (b) a means for making sense of experience—a resource
for structuring and comprehending the world—in their own right. (2013)

For Herman and others who would accept the rubric of “cognitive narratol-
ogy” to describe their work (and he notes a persistent level of resistance to
“cognitivism,” leading some to deny it as a label), this is clearly a continuation
of “narratology” by an expanded range of means. But it is by no means the
only emergent new mode of inquiry focused on the reception of storytelling.
For example, Liesbeth Korthals Altes proposes the concept of “ethos” as
crucial to how readers form “an image of a storyteller’s psychology, world
view, and emotional or ethical stance,” which then affects how they interpret
or evaluate narrative texts (2014, n.p.). Attributing an ethos to characters,
narrators, or authors, she argues, will significantly affect our interpretations.
Then there is the extensive work of a number of mainly Dutch scholars on
“absorption,” described as “a spontaneous temporary change in the state
of consciousness due to an exceptionally intense awareness of a fictional
narrative,” which may be investigated empirically through interview stud-
ies (Hakemulder et al, 2017, n.p.). Comparing these approaches, we might
conclude that Korthals Altes is working within a “metahermeneutic” or more
simply a rhetorical framework, while C and his colleagues are extending
and refining an essentially experimental approach that seeks to define and
measure forms of absorption.
Neither of these approaches is solely, or even specifically focused on
film, or more generally on “screen media.” Indeed, their frequent use of
the term “reader” suggests a kinship with the broader literary tradition
of “reader-response” inquiry. However, another emerging discipline that
directly addresses the abundance of contemporary media is “attention
economics,” focusing on the consequences of competition for our attention by
contemporary digital media. These may be considered negative, as Matthew
Crawford argues: “Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of
it” (2015, 11). Or, less commonly, they may be seen as positive. Clay Shirky
makes use of the concept of “cognitive surplus” in the digital era in his study
subtitled “How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaboration,” arguing
that the connectivity of social media makes possible new forms of social and
cultural collaboration (2010). Whichever view is taken, there can be little
90 Stories

doubt that the pervasiveness of “always on” digital media has had a profound
effect on the consumption of screen-based media, creating new habits and
new pressures, which are often described in terms of “overload” or surplus.
There is, of course, an obvious danger in basing the study of stories on
our present condition – however that is characterized. “In order for us to
do what we do, our minds must have been prepared from before birth to
learn the information specifically relevant to human problems” (Boyd 2009,
39) – or prepared over many generations/ before the arrival of smartphones,
indeed of television and cinema? There is perhaps a certain symmetry
between the traditional “origins of cinema” narrative and the efforts of
modern evolutionary psychology to understand why and how humans have
the storytelling and following capacity. In his pioneering, A Million and
One Nights, which offered “a history of the Motion Picture through 1925”
that reached back to its earliest antecedents, Terry Ramsaye claimed that:

The motion picture is as irresistible as the life stream behind it. […] [It]
may be called the last-born off-spring of the parent impulse of all the
arts of expression, which are seeking to transmit to and infect others
and ourselves with an impression of things and emotions. (1986, xxxviii)

For Ramsaye, seeking to provide newly arrived motion pictures with a

respectable ancestry, the “age-old Wish of the world” that would lead
eventually to movies had its antediluvian origins in “the dawning ability
to re-enjoy by re-creation of the event of pleasurable memory” (xxxix), as
had all previous forms of graphic and dramatic expression. Ramsaye had
no need to invoke Darwin – probably wisely, writing in the same year as the
Scopes Trial saw an American teacher prosecuted for teaching evolution in
defiance of Tennessee’s Fundamentalist prohibition – but recent decades
have seen a number of attempts to ground storytelling in an evolutionary
or biocultural account of human nature.
In his wide-ranging study On the Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd argued, that
an adequate understanding of the storytelling capacity exhibited uniquely
by humans must “take evolution seriously” (Boyd 2009, 38-39). Many animals
display an ability for what we can call “play,” but for Boyd, stories represent
a uniquely representational form of play which has evolved in the human
species. Moreover, as he observes, “to explain fiction fully we cannot merely
explain narrative,” since understanding event sequences is something we
share with other animals (129). The ability to understand representations as
representations has been found to develop naturally in all children between
their second and fifth years. And since such a species-wide ability, together
“Storification” 91

with our clear preference for fictional representation rather than “true” narra-
tion, does not seem to serve any biological need, its origins must lie elsewhere:

Fiction, like art in general, can be explained in terms of cognitive play

with pattern – in this case with patterns of social information – and in
terms of the unique importance of human attention. (130)

A significant implication of this biocultural turn, for Boyd and others, is to

deprivilege structural, ideological, or narratological approaches, in favor of
exploring “deep species-wide competences.”
Although Boyd has little to say about film or screen media (despite credit-
ing David Bordwell as a major influence on his thinking), Torben Grodal
produced an ambitious overview of the potential for applying neuroscientific
and ethological findings to understanding how films are made and expe-
rienced in his Embodied Visions (2009). Conscious that this approach has
been seen as reductive, Grodal offered a defense in his contribution to an
earlier book in the present series:

Bio-culturalism is not an effort to banish history and culture from film

studies. On the contrary, a bio-cultural analysis of film provides a double
historicity: the long evolutionary history that has shaped our embodied
brains and a much shorter recent history in which the interaction of em-
bodied mind, film industry, film makers and audiences mold what specific
film forms and film contents exist at a given moment in time. (2012, 142)

As it happens, a good example of using observed biological evidence from

the recent history of film is provided by David Bordwell in an article offered
in tribute to Grodal (Bordwell 2003). Drawing on empirical studies of how
often people in real-life conversational situations look at each other, and
comparing this with the much higher incidence of such eye-contact in such
films as L.A. Confidential (1997) and Chinatown (1974), Bordwell is able
to hypothesize that the direction and exchange of looks on-screen plays an
important part in how we read narrative, and so has to be conventionally
exaggerated, even within apparently naturalistic styles.
Bordwell links his observations on exchanged looks and blinking in film
with Ed Tan’s more general argument that “the ground of our emotional
engagement in films is the attitude of interest” (Tan 1996, 85). A related
approach to using biophysical data on how spectators related to film viewing
is provided by the work of the psychologist Tim Smith, much of it using
eye-tracking techniques to identify where viewers’ attention is directed
92 Stories

Fig. 5.2: In L.A. Confidential, Bordwell observes that characters “look far more often and fixedly at
listeners” than they would in real life, to avoid sending the wrong signals within the conventions
of screen narrative.

(Smith and Christie 2012; Smith 2016). Smith’s general conclusion, in a report
on “psychocinematics,” stresses:

how incredibly active the viewer is both in terms of how they shift their
gaze around the screen and cognitively process the presented information.
The construction of the narrative is a collaborative process that requires
suitable presentation of the relevant audiovisual information by the
filmmaker and active acquisition and encoding of that information by
the viewer. (2013, chap. 9)

Significantly, the essay to which this formed the conclusionhas as its epigraph
a quotation from Eisenstein’s 1940 “Form and Content” essay, asserting that
“the art of plastic composition consists in leading the spectator’s attention
through the exact path and with the exact sequence prescribed by the author
of the composition” (1968, 148). Once again, it is useful to be reminded that
contemporary research has its roots in the pioneer period of film theory,
with Eisenstein’s contribution to early biophysical and biocultural research
now increasingly recognized (Vassilieva 2013).
“Storification” 93

Fig. 5.3: Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein as a pioneer in both creating and studying control of spectators’
attention.

If “cognitivism” became an important new paradigm for film studies

early in the present century, it has none the less remained controversial
and contested, while many earlier modes of analysis and methodologies
have continued to be practiced. Yet within what has become a pluralistic
field, now addressing a wide range of screen media, formats and “viewing
positions,” it seems more important than ever to insist on the need to define
precisely what questions we are seeking to answer, and to consider the most
appropriate methodology. The fact that film studies, and to some extent media
studies, were long held apart from the social and biological sciences that could
contribute to addressing many of their questions was surely not beneficial.
In a valuable reflection on his own methodological trajectory, Bordwell
looked back at his influential 1985 book Narration in the Fiction Film in a
2011 post. He noted that the book “explicitly left aside the emotional dimen-
sions of narration,” partly because that was typical of cognitive science of
the period, but also because early film studies also tended to disregard
affective issues – possibly as a way of distancing its work from popular “film
appreciation.” Bordwell goes on to reflect on how, subsequently, “the relation
of emotion to cognition has become central to cognitive science,” and how:
94 Stories

cognitive film studies has moved in parallel with cognitive science gener-
ally. We have had neurological studies of film viewing; we have seen
appeals to evolutionary psychology; we have seen studies of suprapersonal
patterns of emergence. (2011)

This account seems to me exemplary in identifying nonpolemically how the

field of film studies has changed, and how one scholar, concerned primarily
with “functional and causal-historical” explanation, has also shifted, taking
advantage of not only important new scientific insights but also of the
ever-widening range of material that film and media historians have before
them. Bordwell’s 2011 post ends by restating the goal expressed in his and
Noël Carroll’s 1996 Post-Theory: “theorizing as an activity that asks research-
able questions and comes up with more or less plausible answers—some
commonsensical, some not, and some probing what counts as common
sense” (Bordwell, 2011).
Two decades after that book’s polemical stance, and with stories and
storytelling currently occupying so much of our cultural landscape, the need
to clarify what questions we want to ask seems obvious, as well as the attrac-
tion of probing ”what counts as common sense” within the “storification”
bubble. So too does the value of making use of different models and methods,
as appropriate, rather than adopting any single “theory of narrative.” Finally,
we are perhaps ready to build upon the contribution of earlier generations of
scholars, working within the frameworks of their era, but often addressing
questions that are still with us, albeit in seemingly novel forms.

Notes

1. See https://sensum.co/. Also the discussion of what can be learned from in-
teractive experiments in the dialogue between Tim J. Smith and Ian Christie
(2012, 183-184).
2. See Sylvester (2006), http://post.queensu.ca/~sylvestr/articles/Storification.
pdf; Akkerman, Admiraal, and Huizenga (2009), https://dl.acm.org/citation.
cfm?id=1480564; Clark (2010), http://niemanreports.org/articles/journalism-
on-the-map-a-case-for-location-aware-storytelling/.
3. “Story-designed services” by Tarinakone, http://www.tarinakone.fi/en/.
4. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, written in 1928, was first
translated into English in 1958, and became a key inspiration for much early
structuralist analysis. Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970, trans. 1974) offered a semi-
otic analysis of Balzac’s 1830 novella Sarrasine.
“Storification” 95

References and Further Reading

Akkerman, Sanne, Wilfried Admiraal, and Jantina Huizenga. 2009. “Storification in History
Education: A Mobile Game in and about Medieval Amsterdam.” Computers & Education 52,
no. 2 (February): 449-459.
Barker, Martin. 2012. “Crossing Out the Audience.” In Audiences: Defining and Researching
Screen Entertainment Reception, edited by Ian Christie, 187-205. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Barraza, J.A., V. Alexander, L.E. Beavin, E.T. Terris, and P.J. Zak. 2015. “The Heart of the Story:
Peripheral Physiology during Narrative Exposure Predicts Charitable Giving.” Biol Psychol
(February): 138-143. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25617658.
Barthes, Roland, 1974 [1970]. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bordwell, David. 2003. “Who Blinked First? How Film Style Streamlines Nonverbal Interaction.”
In Film Style and Story: A Tribute to Torben Grodal, edited by Lennard Højbjerg and Peter
Schepelern. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
—. 2008. Poetics of Cinema. New York and London: Routledge.
—. 2011. “Common Sense, etc.” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema. http://www.davidbordwell.
net/essays/commonsense.php#_ednref13.
Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll. 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI
and London: Wisconsin University Press.
Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Browne, Nick. 1975-1976. “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach.” Film Quarterly
29, no. 2 (Winter): 26-38.
Christie, Ian, ed. 2012. Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Clark, Krissy. 2010. “Journalism on the Map: A Case for Location-Aware Storytelling.” Nieman
Reports (Summer). http://niemanreports.org/articles/journalism-on-the-map-a-case-for-
location-aware-storytelling/.
Crawford, Matthew. 2015. “Introduction, Attention as a Cultural Problem.” In The World beyond
Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Crofts, Stephen, and Olivia Rose. 1977. “An Essay Towards The Man with a Movie Camera.” Screen
18, no. 1 (March): 9-60.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1968 [1943]. “Form and Content: Practice.” In The Film Sense, edited by Jay
Leyda. London: Faber.
Grodal, Torben. 2009. Embodied Visions. Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film. New York: Oxford
University Press.
—. 2012. “Tapping into Our Tribal Heritage: Lord of the Rings and Brain Evolution.” In Audiences:
Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, edited by Ian Christie, 128-142.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Hakemulder, Frank, Moniek Kuijpers, Ed S. Tan, Katalin Bálint, and Miruna M. Doicaru, eds. 2017.
Narrative Absorption. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishers. https://www.
researchgate.net/publication/322337263_Narrative_Absorption_Introduction_and_overview.
Herman, David. 2013. “Cognitive Narratology.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by
Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Accessed February 20, 2018. http://
wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Cognitive_Narratology.
96 Stories

Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2014. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in
Fiction. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Propp, Vladimir. 1958 [1928]. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Translated by Laurence Scott. Bloom-
ington, ID: Indiana University.
Ramsaye, Terry. 1986 [1926]. A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through
1925. New York: Simon & Shuster.
Shirky, Clay. 2010. Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New
York: Penguin.
Smith, Tim J. 2013. “Watching You Watch Movies: Using Eye Tracking to Inform Cognitive Film
Theory.” In Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, edited by A. Shimamura,
165-191. New York: Oxford University Press.
—. 2016. Continuity Boy: A Blog about My Empirical Investigation of Film Perception. March 7,
2016. http://continuityboy.blogspot.co.uk/.
Smith, Tim J., and Ian Christie. 2012. “Exploring Inner Worlds: Where Cognitive Psychology May
Take Us.” In Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, 170-184.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Sylvester, Michael J. 2006. “Storification – A New Way to Use an Old Tool.” Science Communications
(April). http://post.queensu.ca/~sylvestr/articles/Storification.pdf.
Tan, Ed S. 1996. “The Structure of Interest.”In Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film
as an Emotion Machine, 85-119. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
—. 2008. “Entertainment Is Emotion: The Functional Architecture of the Entertainment Experi-
ence.” Media Psychology 11, no. 1 (March): 28-51.
Vassilieva, Julia. 2013. “Eisenstein/Vygotsky/Luria’s Project: Cinematic Thinking and the In-
tegrative Science of Mind and Brain.” Screening the Past 38. http://www.screeningthepast.
com/2013/12/eisenstein-vygotsky-luria%E2%80%99s-project-cinematic-thinking-and-the-
integrative-science-of-mind-and-brain/.
Zak, Paul J. 2014. “Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling.” Harvard Business Review, October
28, 2014. https://hbr.org/2014/10/why-your-brain-loves-good-storytelling.
6. Transmedia Storytelling
New Practices and Audiences

Melanie Schiller

Prologue

Stories in popular culture such as Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Harry

Potter, or superhero sagas in the Marvel universe, are examples of stories
which are increasingly told across a wide range of media, from novels and
books to (animated) television series and feature films, jigsaw puzzles and
computer games, online blogs, vlogs, webisodes, social media, and so-called
mobisodes (short episodes made specifically for viewing on mobile phones).
Another famous example is the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999-2005), where
key pieces of information are conveyed across three action films, a series of
animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video
games. In the case of The Matrix, there is no single urtext from which one
can gain all the information needed to comprehend the story’s universe
(Jenkins 2007). For such new forms of storytelling associated with media
convergence and expanding across multiple media platforms, Jenkins (2006)
coined the (umbrella) term transmedia storytelling. The term refers to:

a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically

across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and
coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its
own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. (Jenkins 2007, n.p.)

From the start, the phenomenon was clearly interesting for the industry, as
shown by The Matrix. The entertainment industry was finding new ways
to appeal to audiences, by merging media with marketing and entertain-
ment strategies to appeal to young audiences in ways that had not been
available to them in the predigital era. Nevertheless, there is more to this
than marketing alone. The range of phenomena referred to by the term
“transmedia storytelling” involves many different aspects, including new
forms of storytelling and complex narratives; a new cultural context in which
social media, connectivity, fan cultures, and online-information exchange
play a big role, as do the use of marketing strategies and appropriate business
models to address audiences in the world of digital connectivity. Smart
98 Stories

technologies are abundantly available to facilitate such processes; and new

legal frameworks can help frame and support them (Gambarato 2015, 81).
However strongly new practices of storytelling across media are linked
with the media entertainment industries’ commercial interests in promoting
entertainment franchises, it can hardly be denied that transmedia storytell-
ing is also driven by users’ increasing desire for transmedia experiences, as
emphasized by recent debates (Clash of Realities 2015, 99). The phenomenon
fits into the broader context of a growing popularity of user-generated
content and fan productions. The culture of media convergence is typically
marked by a flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation
between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media
audiences “who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertain-
ment experiences they want” (Jenkins 2006, 2). According to Jenkins, this
new culture marks a cultural shift from a spectatorial culture of “passive”
media consumption to a more active, participatory culture, as fans and
consumers are encouraged to seek out new information themselves, to make
their own connections among dispersed media content, and to participate
actively in the creation and circulation of new stories and content (2006, 3).
It seems clear that the suggested shift from “passive” consumer to “active”
participant presupposes a collaborative relationship of some sort between
professional authors / industry-embedded producers and the consumer
base of amateurs. The term coined for this is “collaborative authorship.”
The new practice of transmedia storytelling (Bernardo 2011) assumes new
forms of cooperation between:

– d ifferent media industries, such as film, gaming, and publishing;

– different professional roles, such as screen-writers, comic-book writers,
animators, and programmers;
– different artists shaping the story; and
– a collaborative relationship with the consumer base of participating
amateurs.

To explain how the new practices work, Jenkins discusses stories, such as
Heroes (2006-2010) or Lost (2004-2010), which have spread from television
series to comics, the web, computer and alternative-reality games (also part
of the entertainment industry), and the like. In the process, they acquire
new consumers as they unfold, allowing the most dedicated fans to take
it one step further (Jenkins 2010, 948). These fans are described by Jenkins
and others as actively participating in the process: they translate their
interests in the stories and the franchise into a range of media messages,
Tr ansmedia Story telling 99

from concordances and Wikipedia entries, fan fiction, and fan videos to
fan films, “cosplay,” and game mods.1 Such participatory fan practices in-
evitably extend the story world in new directions. Thus, both commercial
and grassroots expansions of narrative universes may contribute to a new
mode of transmedia storytelling which can best be understood as both a
top-down corporate process and a bottom-up consumer-driven one (Jenkins
and Deuze 2008, 6).

Adaptation, Remediation, Transmedia, and Storytelling in the

Stricter Sense

For a further understanding of these new practices of storytelling across

media, it is important to distinguish between media adaptations or remedia-
tions – like the film version of a novel – and transmedia storytelling in the
stricter sense. While the first points to the unidirectional movement from
one medium to another, the latter refers to a much broader expansion of
narrative structure through storytelling activities in a range of different
semiotic systems (verbal, iconic, behavioral) and historical media practices
(cinema, comics, television, video games), all of which contribute to the
construction of the overall transmedia story world (Scolari 2009).
There are also other terms, often referred to alongside transmedia story-
telling, which must be kept separate, as they refer to phenomena other than
storytelling, such as cross-media communication. In general, both terms refer
to media production that takes place through different display technolo-
gies and media platforms (such as social networking, YouTube). However,
cross-media communication is a broader, more generic term that includes
the whole process of communication and interactivity (Mungioli 2011, 128;
Gambarato 2013, 83). In the case of transmedia storytelling, the emphasis is
strictly on narrative, and each medium involved in the storytelling practice
is assumed to do what it does best (Jenkins 2006, 96). This implies that the
story told by a comic book will be different from that told on television as
part of a TV series, or the story world presented in a video game.
A story may well move across media, as the study by Marie-Laure Ryan
and Jan-Noël Thon, Storyworlds across Media (2014), suggests. In light of these
new developments in storytelling, they plead for new narrative theories, and
a Media-Conscious Narratology, as the subtitle of their study indicates. As
narrative experts, Ryan and Thon were originally interested in stories and
storytelling strategies found mainly in literature. More recently, however,
they have come to address phenomena such as stories moving across media,
100 Stories

acknowledging that new practices of storytelling have evolved and that a

story may be introduced in a film, expanded through a television series,
explored through (graphic) novels and comics, and experienced through
theme parks, game play, interactive websites, and fan fora. Jenkins argued
that for a transmedia story world to develop in this way, each of these media
platforms needs to be sufficiently self-contained to enable autonomous
consumption: the user of the media content need not have read the comic
to enjoy the film or play the game (Jenkins 2006, 98).
Although it may be argued that transmedia storytelling reflects the
economics of media consolidation or “media synergy,” the phenomenon
should not be conflated with general transmedia extensions of franchise
branding. Transmedia storytelling, even in the stricter sense, may still
include some narrative extensions of a new blockbuster movie through the
release of prequel comic book issues, or expanded backstories in a video
game. Nevertheless, the phenomenon cannot be reduced to mere franchise
branding and exploitation, as in the production of toys, merchandise and
the release of the original soundtrack on promotional websites. In the
reality of marketing, these cross-media activities often go together and
ideally even create some synergy. Clearly, however, the analysis of branding
and marketing strategies invites a different analytical approach than the
narrative analyses of story worlds across media. Whereas the latter may
benefit from narrative analyses of expanding story worlds and puzzling
story twists, as Ryan, Thon and others (cognitivists among them) offer,
Harvard business professor, Anita Elberse, has argued in her study on
blockbusters for an analysis of marketing strategies of the film / entertain-
ment industry in line with social impulses and behavior of audiences
(Elberse 2013). Elberse acknowledges that people, by their very nature, are
social beings and find value in reading the same books, watching the same
television shows, and visiting the same movies in the cinema as others
do. Social beings like to take part in social activities in which they know
others are taking part. In other words, transmedia storytelling practices
may go well with marketing strategies of the industry aiming at creating
blockbusters. Once a certain story (a film, book, certain character, or star)
is popular and has been widely discussed in the media, audiences have
much more reason to become part of the intrinsically social phenomena
of reading/seeing/discussing this popular object of interest. With the
“blockbuster” strategies adopted by the industry to promote one movie on
a massive scale rather than many movies in a moderate or small way, the
“winner takes all” effect in the world of big budget movies, together with
big budget marketing, ensures that audiences are pulled in and become
Tr ansmedia Story telling 101

participants in these captivating story worlds which are celebrated across

media (Elberse 2013).

Transmedia as a Buzzword

Despite the growing prominence in media studies of transmedia as a

buzzword (Ryan 2015) and the fact that transmedia storytelling may be
a new concept, any thoughtful study of contemporary transmedia must
acknowledge that it is not a new phenomenon, unique to the digital age,
as several authors have noted (Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman 2014). Marie-
Laure Ryan recalls that story worlds involving multiple authors and artists
interpreting and representing such worlds in many media already existed
long before digital media and the social web – indeed it may be traced
back at least to classical Greece and perhaps even before (Ryan 2013).
One need only think of pictures dramatizing biblical scenes, or iconic
nineteenth-century characters such as Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes
whose narrative scope transcends any single medium, as noted by Jason
Mittell. Alternatively, we may think of one of US television’s f irst hits,
Dragnet, which spanned multiple media, having started as a radio program.
The popular TV series spawned many novels; a feature film; a hit record
for its theme song; tie-in toys such as a board game, a police badge, and a
whistle; and even a television reboot of the 1950s original in the late 1960s
(Mittell 2015). Other famous examples are Star Trek and Doctor Who,
or even popular narratives as early as the 1930s, such as Mickey Mouse or
Batman, all of which made their appearance in different media (comics,
pulp magazines, radio, etc.) (Scolari et al. 2014). Moreover, fan fiction is
far from a new phenomenon, having existed before the digital revolution,
as Ryan observes, while acknowledging that the phenomenon has since
exploded across the Internet, making it possible for fans to share their
creations with countless other fans across the globe (Ryan 2013, 10; Lindgren
Leavenworth 2015; Thomas 2011).
A second point of criticism addresses the celebratory tone of some stud-
ies, starting with Jenkins’s widely cited 2006 book, which celebrated the
new era of transmedia storytelling in terms of a participatory culture that
replaced passive consumers with active audiences. This binary opposition
was criticized as anachronistic, making a claim that was already com-
monplace within poststructuralism, after Roland Barthes’s celebration of
“the Death of the Author” in the late 1960s (Barthes 1967); and Stuart Hall,
as the founder of Cultural Studies, who emphasized the active audience
102 Stories

in his influential “encoding-decoding” model in the 1970s (Hall 1973). The

question then must be: to what extent is the phenomenon genuinely new?

What Is New and Different about Transmedia Storytelling?

The phenomenon is not entirely new, but rooted in much older practices,
as several authors have argued, also stating that the proliferation of digital
forms has led to a marked increase in transmedia storytelling practices and
techniques (Mittell 2015; Gambarato 2015). Drawing on these commenta-
tors, we might summarize what is new and different about transmedia
storytelling – and what narrative analyses we may want to focus on in
future research – as follows.
It involves creating a new corpus of extensive stories that move beyond
traditional storytelling and demand new terms of user participation as well
as analysis. These stories manifest themselves less as singular plots, and may
seem to readers and viewers more like architecturally narrative universes,
inhabited by multiple characters, and articulating complex temporalities and
contradictory perspectives. As transmedia stories can be told from different
points of view, with shifting narrators and changes in focalization, these
narrative universes are typically open-ended. As a result of fan-fiction and
user participation, the temporal composition of these narratives becomes
increasingly complex, since by their very nature, transmedia stories unfold
in different sequences and across different timeframes for each audience
member (Kustritz 2017). Additionally, as Kustritz observes, fan narratives
not only include events which are out of sequence, but may also contain
numerous alternate interpretations and versions of the same events.
Transmedia narratives, as they move through different media, prob-
lematize notions of authorship: these narrative universes do so not only by
expanding across multiple media, which necessitates collective authorship,
but also by allowing and actively encouraging audience participation. As a
result, the borders between text, paratext, and fan-fiction become increas-
ingly blurred. While it is relatively easy to identify the author of a novel
(disregarding the editors and others who may have had an invisible hand
in its composition), it is more difficult to single out one creative participant
as the author of an entity as economically and culturally all-encompassing
as Harry Potter, notes James Russell (2012). The #BlackHermione fan fic-
tion, for instance, which identifies Harry Potter’s friend, Hermione, as a
Person of Color, has now been incorporated into the “official” Harry Potter
universe when the character (as an adult) was played by Swaziland-born
Tr ansmedia Story telling 103

actress, Noma Dumezweni, in the 2016 London stage production of Harry

Potter and the Cursed Child – a prequel to the original Harry Potter novels.
Therefore, the questions are now: Who determines a character’s personality
traits? Who makes the rules in the fictional universe? And who decides
what “really” happened? (Kustritz 2014) Increasing dependence on (fan)
participation obviously challenges traditional notions of authorship, and one
may wonder whether there are forms which challenge and indeed worry the
entertainment industry focused on keeping control of its market position.
In light of this, it is interesting to observe that franchises attempt to retain
traditional markers of authority such as authorship. In the “Wizarding
World” of Harry Potter, the official website Pottermore, in an interesting
balancing act, seeks to reinvent the brand and prolong engagement with
its fan base, while simultaneously reinforcing J.K. Rowling as the central
authorial figure of the story world (Brummitt 2016).
Transmedia storytelling as such depends on audience participation and
therefore grants increased agency to fan cultures. Increasingly, fans are
agents in the creation and negotiation of the meaning-making of (popular)
cultural texts. An advantage of this, often mentioned in debates, is that
it can lead to more diverse representations in popular culture. Jenkins
celebrated this shift in narrative authority, perhaps prematurely, in his
books and many articles as “we take control of the media.” However, it is
fair to note that the emergence, however slow, of different marginalized
perspectives in mainstream popular culture is becoming a force to be
reckoned with. Fan-cultural production and fan-consumers are no longer
considered eccentric irritants, but rather loyal and devoted consumers
(Hills 2002). The Star Wars fans, who have been putting pressure on the
entertainment industry to provide a different, more diverse set of characters,
and who have shown mounting impatience with the industry’s slow process
of diversification of the franchise’s universe, are a good example of this. As
a result, the transnational casting of The Force Awakens (2015) and Rogue
One (2016) finally portrayed strong female characters and characters of color,
although Disney was still reluctant to fully embrace this diversification in its
marketing strategies (Guynes and Hassler-Forest 2018). The progress of this
trend might be measured in terms of such recent films as Wonder Woman
(2017) and Black Panther (2018), which surely reflect the importance of
fan cultures today.
The new emphasis on collaborative authorship leads to yet another
important element of transmedia narratives: their dependence on the
participation of audiences reemphasizes the fundamentally social function
of stories, as Walter Benjamin (2006) outlined in his 1936 essay. Today,
104 Stories

this is echoed by Nuno Bernardo (2016), an expert in story design for a

multiplatform audience, who defines storytelling as bringing individuals
together by revealing some truth about the world around them.
Finally, realizing how essential stories are for our social positioning in
the world, transmedia storytelling may also create new opportunities in
fields beyond fictional entertainment. These new practices of storytelling
seem to offer, and indeed scholars are exploring, the potential of transmedia
storytelling for expanding learning opportunities in higher education
(Fleming 2011; Pence 2011; Kalogeras 2014), nonf ictional storytelling in
journalism (Moloney 2011; Veglis 2012; Pernía Peñalver and Semova 2014),
and in politics and activism (Brough and Shresthova 2012). For Jenkins, a
veteran of earlier phases of studying popular media, it is clear that we need
shared stories in order to imagine what a better world may look like and to
work toward its achievement (Guynes and Hassler-Forest 2018).

Epilogue

Transmedia storytelling is a relatively new phenomenon and, in terms of

production and analysis, is still in its infancy. Theoretical and analytical
considerations around the development of transmedia projects are evolving,
but remain relatively open in terms of results (Gambarato 2015). Broadcasters
and the industry are in the process of finding the right narratives (Bernardo
2018) and the right role for them to play, while scholars have embarked on
the definition of key terms and discussion of research goals and methods
of analysis. Additionally, the practice of storytelling itself is far from fully
developed and, as Propp said of his work on folktales in 1928, analyzing the
structure of such hitherto disregarded material will increase the possibilities
for creating new stories (Scolari 2009).
Media developer, Brian Clark, maintains that there have been no great
transmedia successes yet, at least partly because most transmedia stories
were not conceived as such from the outset, but became transmedial (Ryan
2013). The future should bring new kinds of stories. Creating coherent com-
plex transmedia narratives requires a degree of storytelling control that the
current system of television production seems unable to meet fully. Taking
into account that transmedia stories propose new institutional as well as
new narrative models (Scolari 2009), future development will need teams
that are able to successfully manage such integrated narratives (Mittell
2015). It will also be interesting to see the impact of further technological
innovations – such as Google Glasses, or 4K, 8K, and live cinema (Coppola
Tr ansmedia Story telling 105

2017) – offering potentially greater immersion, multiple timelines, and

interactive storytelling (Freeman 2017).
To respond to the growing influence of fans, the industry will have to
produce an enhanced diversity of characters and story world representations,
as is already happening to a limited extent. Further research also needs
to address the dynamic interplay between marketing-driven transmedia
storytelling on the one hand, and the home-made contributions of audiences
on the other. Lastly, new narrative models and concepts for collective forms
of authorship still need to be developed, to address the convergence of the
traditionally separate roles of authors, industry, and consumers.

Notes

1. Cosplay or costume play refers to participants wearing costumes and fash-

ion accessories to represent a specific character. Game mods are modifica-
tions of an existing game to enhance its appeal or complexity.

References and Further Reading

Benjamin, Walter. 2006 [1936]. “The Storyteller.” In The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and
Theory 1900-2000, edited by Dorothy J. Hale. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Barthes, Roland. 1977 [1967]. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, 142-148. New
York: Hill & Wang.
Bernardo, Nuno. 2011. The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia: How to Develop, Fund, Produce and
Distribute Compelling Stories across Multiple Platforms. London: beActive Books.
—. 2016. “Story Design for a Multi-Platform Audience.” Nuno Bernardo (blog), February 19, 2016.
http://nunobernardo.com/story-design-for-multiplatform-audience/.
Brough, Melissa M., and Sangita Shresthova. 2012. “Fandom Meets Activism: Rethinking Civic
and Political Participation.” Transformative Works and Cultures 10.
Brummitt, Cassie. 2016. “Pottermore: Transmedia Storytelling and Authorship in Harry Potter.”
The Midwest Quarterly 58: 112-132.
Clash of Realities, ed. 2017. Clash of Realities 2015/16: On the Art, Technology and Theory of Digital
Games. Proceedings of the 6th and 7th Conference. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
Coppola, Francis Ford. 2017. Live Cinema and Its Techniques. New York and London: Liveright.
Elberse, Anita. 2013. Blockbusters. Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment.
New York: Henry Holt & Company.
Fleming, Laura. 2011. “Pedagogical Considerations of the Transmedia Mythology.” EdTech Insight:
Transmedia and Education.
—. 2013. “Expanding Learning Opportunities with Transmedia Practices: Inanimate Alice as
an Exemplar.” Journal of Media Literacy Education 5, no. 2: 370-377.
Foucault, Michel. 1984 [1969]. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow, 299-314. New York: Pantheon Books.
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Freeman, Matthew. 2017. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Trans-

media. London: Routledge.
Gambarato, R.R. 2015. “Transmedia Project Design: Theoretical and Analytical Considerations.”
Baltic Screen Media Review 1: 80-100. https://doi.org/10.1515/bsmr-2015-0006.
Guynes, Sean, and Dan Hassler-Forest, eds. 2018. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia
Storytelling, Transmedia. Vol. 3. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: Centre for
Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.
Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. New York: Psychology Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New
York University Press.
—. 2007. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Henry Jenkins. Confessions of an Aca-Fan (blog), March
21, 2007.http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html.
—. 2010. “Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: An Annotated Syllabus.” Continuum 24:
943-958. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2010.510599.
—. 2018. “Transmedia Storytelling.” MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.
com/s/401760/transmedia-storytelling/.
Jenkins, Henry, and Mark Deuze. 2008. “Editorial: Convergence Culture.” Convergence 14: 5-12.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856507084415.
Kalogeras, Stavroula. 2014. Transmedia Storytelling and the New Era of Media Convergence in
Higher Education. London: Springer.
Kustritz, A.M. 2014. “Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse – Flexible and Multiple
Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids.” TV/Series 6: 225-261.
—. 2017. “Interactivité, resémantisation, et plaisirs de la primauté ontologique – les œuvres
de fans comme centre du récit.” Revue Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Com-
munication 10.
Lindgren Leavenworth, Maria. 2015. “The Paratext of Fan Fiction.” Narrative 23, no. 1: 40-60.
Mittell, Jason, ed. 2015. “Transmedia Storytelling.” In Complex TV, The Poetics of Contemporary
Television Storytelling, 292-318. New York: New York University Press. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/j.ctt15r3zwk.13.
Moloney, Kevin T. 2011. Porting Transmedia Storytelling to Journalism. Denver: University of
Denver.
Mungioli, M.C. 2011. “Narratives, Languages and Media in the Context of Interactive Digital
Technologies: Interview with Carlos A. Scolari.” MATRIZes: Revista do Programa de Pós-
Graduação em Ciências da Comunicação da Universidade de São Paulo 4, no. 2: 127-136.
Nuno Bernardo. 2018. http://nunobernardo.com/author/admin/.
Pence, Harry E. 2011. “Teaching with Transmedia.” Journal of Educational Technology Systems
40, no.2: 131-140.
Pernía Peñalver, Noé Orlando, and Dimitrina Semova. 2014. “Crisis Política y Narrativas Trans-
media En Las Protestas de 2014 En Venezuela / Political Crisis and Transmedia Storytelling
in the 2014 Protests in Venezuela.” Revista Mediterránea de Comunicación 7: 163-177.
Russell, James. 2012. “Authorship, Commerce, and Harry Potter.” In A Companion to Literature,
Film, and Adaptation, edited by Deborah Cartmell, 391-407. Oxford and Malden, MA: John
Wiley & Sons. Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118312032.ch22.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2013. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today 34,
no. 3: 361-388.
—. 2015. “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword or New Narrative Experience?” Storyworlds:
A Journal of Narrative Studies 7: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.5250/storyworlds.7.2.0001.
Tr ansmedia Story telling 107

Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon. 2014. Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious
Narratology. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/
book/31010.
Scolari, Carlos Alberto. 2009. “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds,
and Branding in Contemporary Media Production.” International Journal of Communication
3: 586-606.
Scolari, C., P. Bertetti, and M. Freeman. 2014. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the
Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. London: Springer.
Thomas, Bronwen. 2011. “What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things about
It?” Storyworlds 3: 1-24.
Veglis, Andreas. 2012. “From Cross Media to Transmedia Reporting in Newspaper Articles.”
Publishing Research Quarterly 28, no. 4: 313-324.
 PART II
History and Analyses
7. The Endless Endings of Michelangelo
Antonioni’s Films
José Moure

Michelangelo Antonioni dreamed of:

A film with a beginning, but maybe without an end. I have often won-
dered … whether there should always be an ending to stories, whether
literary, theatrical or cinematographic. A story which closes in on itself
runs the risk of dying if another dimension is not provided, if one does
not allow one’s own time to be extended externally to where we are, we
who are the protagonists of all stories. Where nothing ends. (Antonioni
1985, 224-225)

Built up around a disappearance or feeling of loss, and plotted along erratic,

dissolving trajectories which efface or displace the initial emptiness without
filling it, Antonioni’s stories seem to resolve only in indecisiveness: the
indecisiveness of a spiraling dénouement which is not a simple erasure or
return to the point of departure. Instead, it “expresses the entropy, degrada-
tion and irreversibility of events” narrated in the course of the film, the
irresolution of a dénouement in eclipse which “represents that ultimate
point of a human being at last delivered from the negativity of projects,
passions and human existence” (Bonitzer 1985, 101).

The Endless Spiral

From Cronaca di un amore (1950) to Identificazione di una donna

(1982), most of Antonioni’s f ilms are resolved at the end by means of a
“spiral” structure which, while tending to complete the film by way of a
circular and centripetal movement of returning to the place of departure
or a situation which is very near that of the beginning, leaves a certain
number of questions unresolved and open, thus suspending the story in the
void around which it has incessantly revolved, confronting the characters
with repetition “for not having been able to escape the first time during
the times that followed” (Amengual 1964, 56). The fundamental structure
of Antonioni’s films follows a cyclical model, which apparently brings the
112 Stories

characters back to the starting point, place, or situation after an adventure

that seems to have been pointless.
At the end of Cronaca di un amore, after the fatal accident of Paola’s
husband, the two lovers find themselves in a situation similar to that which
separated them in the past after the accidental death of Guido’s fiancée.
At the end of Il grido (1957), after long meanderings in search of an
impossible oblivion, Aldo comes back to his point of departure to die
before Irma’s eyes, by falling from the tower of the sugar refinery where
he worked (in the last sequence, Aldo runs toward the factory while
Irma runs after him, thus moving in the opposite direction of the f irst
sequence).
At the end of L’avventura (1960), after having replaced the girlfriend
at Sandro’s side, Claudia reaches the point where Anna gave up: that of
infidelity, of love without love or illusions, and of compassion.
At the end of La notte (1961), after a day of wandering around which
started with a visit to a dying friend, Lidia and Giovanni receive news
that the friend in question has died. In the early morning, on the edge of a
deserted park, they receive confirmation that their love, too, is dead, despite
Giovanni’s desperate attempt to embrace his wife, an act that serves as a
reminder of the young nymphomaniac who threw herself at him in the
clinic corridor.
At the end of The Eclipse (1962), the sentimental adventure between
Vittoria and Piero seems to dissolve into the void of the places where they
met, in the same way as the liaison between Vittoria and Riccardo exhausted
itself in the latter’s object-saturated apartment at the beginning of the film.
At the end of Il deserto rosso (1964), Giuliana is walking with her son
near the petrol refinery where chimneys continue to spew yellow smoke,
a scene which is reminiscent of the opening sequence.
At the end of Blow Up (1966), while Thomas wanders around in the park
and notices that the corpse has disappeared, he again encounters the group
of mimes whom he ran into at the beginning of the film as he was leaving
a night shelter, surrounded by tramps.
At the end of Zabriskie Point (1970), after his plane trip across the
desert, Mark, who is suspected of having murdered a policeman, is shot
down without warning while bringing the stolen apparatus back to the
place where he borrowed it.
At the end of The Passenger (1975), David Locke/Robertson, who feigned
death, dies for real and fulfills the destiny he accepted at the start of the
film by slipping into a corpse’s skin.
The Endless Endings of Michel angelo Antonioni’s Films 113

At the end of Identificazione di una donna, just as in the beginning of

the film, Niccolo returns to Rome and prepares to write a new script: only
this time, the subject will be science fiction.
Far from the story closing in on itself by providing a solution or response to
the enigmas, interrogations, or expectations raised in the course of the film,
the recurring, loop-like endings of Antonioni’s films always leave something
in suspense, as though the graph of the characters’ circular trajectories
eventually rolls up around itself in a never-ending loop, in a spiral-like
dénouement which opens up unavoidably into the void of irresolution.
At the end of an Antonioni film, the intrigue is never really made clear,
either because:

– T he enigma (Anna’s disappearance in L’avventura; the crime in the

park in Blow Up) at the center of the intrigue is unresolved, or the
characters interrupt or forget their investigation in the process.
– The dénouement itself remains obscure from an anecdotal point of
view (does the husband in Cronaca di un amore commit suicide
because of a police report on his wife’s infidelity, or did he really have
an accident? In Il grido, did Aldo throw himself from the top of the
tower of the sugar refinery or, which is less probable, was he also the
victim of an accident? For what reason and by whom was David Locke/
Robertson killed in The Passenger?).
– The final scene, by its ambiguity, creates an endless suspension or total
eclipse of the intrigue both as far as its meaning is concerned (does
the fact that Claudia runs her fingers through Sandro’s hair at the end
of L’avventura mean that his betrayal is forgiven? Does Giuliana’s
stroll with her son at the end of Il deserto rosso mean that she has
been cured of her neurosis? When Thomas joins in the performance
of the mime artists at the end of Blow Up, does it mean that he has
learned how to look at things?), as well as its virtual prolongation in
the “after-film” (will Lidia leave Giovanni “after” La notte? What
happens to Vittoria and Piero after the wasted opportunity of The
Eclipse? After having failed in his Identificazione di una donna,
will Niccolo make the science-fiction film that he plans to shoot?).

If a film by Antonioni is resolved, it is only by means of an irresolution

without solution (because it is resolved by default in death, renunciation,
compromise, uncertainty, or eclipse), suspending the characters’ present
in an endless expectation of a future without content.
114 Stories

An Ending in Eclipse

Antonioni’s films end on suspended dénouements (in suspension points and

questions) which, far from opening the film into an indeterminate future
or field of opportunity, marks the return of the story to a type of stalemate
or nonresult where the unresolved intrigue (without mystery or solution,
henceforth open but already deprived of potential, incomplete but almost
fossilized) exhausts itself and settles into the void around which it has not
ceased to revolve, brought to the surface of the world or the conscience of
human beings by the erratic, dissolving trajectories of the characters, who
were unable to fill that void.
The final sequence of an Antonioni film is only irresolute because the
story’s future has no solution. At the end of their adventure, the characters
find themselves facing a reality which they cannot escape. There is nothing
left for them to do except resign and sacrifice themselves either by:

– d eath, by slipping into the void – like Rosetta in Le amiche (1955), Aldo
in Il grido, Mark in Zabriskie Point, and David Locke/Robertson
in The Passenger;
– or in a less tragic way, by an act of renunciation – like Clara in La
signora senza camelie (1953) who renounces her dignity as an actress,
Clelia in Le amiche who renounces Carlo, Vittoria in The Eclipse who
renounces love, Thomas in Blow Up who renounces grasping reality,
and Niccolo in Identificazione di una donna who renounces his film;
– or by another type of survival with no illusions, i.e., compromising – like
Claudia in L’avventura who forgives Sandro, Lidia in La notte who
gives in to Giovanni’s pathetic embrace, and Giuliana in Il deserto
rosso who accepts life and reality as they are.

Thus, the end is the moment when a story unravels in a present which is
decanted and free from past illusions and future inevitability. It is, of course,
as much the mystery (the meaning of the past) as the outcome of the future
that is being eclipsed at the same time as the story. All that remains is the
tangible and opaque event recorded in the dimension of the precarious
and the possible, stripped of all finality and without any indication of the
meaning that should be attributed to the sequel.
From this point of view, the final sequence of The Eclipse provides the
dénouement of a film by Antonioni with its most emblematic form and
script: that of a wasted opportunity where past promises and future threats
are decanted into the void of a space-time devoid of quality, in the process
The Endless Endings of Michel angelo Antonioni’s Films 115

Fig. 7.1: The final sequence of The Eclipse; “a wasted opportunity where past promises and future
threats are decanted into the void of a space-time devoid of quality.”

of reification, eclipsing characters and adventures, and presenting only the

remains of a still-born sentimental story which, even before reaching its
conclusion, freezes in revisiting the now empty spaces where rendezvous
once took place; mineralizes in a suspension of what is to become; dissolves
into a temporary darkening of the world; fades “behind an accumulation of
micro-facts, notations and localisations which, while having as their initial
aim to illustrate events as they develop [the rendez-vous neither Vittoria nor
Piero will go to], eventually constituting a parallel world all by themselves”
(Ollier 1981, 87), where future advance and past nostalgia are substituted for
a participatory connection with a mysterious, suspended present.
After their lovemaking in the stockbroker’s deserted offices has been
interrupted by the ringing of a doorbell, Vittoria and Piero part tenderly:

Piero: Will we see one another tomorrow? (Vittoria nods yes.)

We’ll see one another tomorrow and the day after.
Vittoria: And the day after and the day following that as well.
Piero: And the one after, too.
Vittoria: And tonight.
Piero: At eight. Same place.

They gaze at each other, then embrace with an almost desperate, anxious
intensity. As Vittoria leaves, she looks at Piero one last time and disappears
down the staircase.
116 Stories

Piero returns to his office and closes the door; he is in a pensive mood.
With robot-like gestures, he replaces all the receivers of the telephones he
took off the hook. On the stairs, the young woman, who is also in a pensive
mood, descends slowly; she stops and leans against the lift shaft which is
being repaired. In his office, the young man, who still looks pensive, but
who smiles faintly, sits down at his desk, when the telephones in an adjacent
room as well as the one on his desk start ringing. He remains motionless,
leans back against his chair, absorbed in his thoughts, his eyes closed, now
serious (Piero is not seen again).
After having glanced up behind her, Vittoria (as though she could hear
the ringing of the telephones or could still see Piero) continues her slow
descent of the staircase. When she reaches the entrance door, after a last
hesitation, she exits and starts walking quickly and with conviction. A
female passer-by bumps into her and this ordinary incident is enough to
interrupt her walking. She stops, pensively, in front of the iron curtain of a
closed shop, turns around and looks at the tops of the trees outlined against
the sky; then, after having glanced one last time toward the windows of
Piero’s office, she walks away and disappears, peacefully, almost serenely,
with a faint, secretive smile on her lips (Vittoria is not seen again).
In the famous final sequence, from dusk to dark, all the places where
Vittoria and Piero used to wait for and meet each other file past: the area
around the crossroads and in front of the house under construction. In this
final coda we are presented with an accumulation and a succession of shots
of that which, until that point, constituted merely the diegetic background
of the film and of Vittoria and Piero’s amorous adventure.
An automatic sprinkler is on in the park; the nurse is pushing a pram.
Piles of bricks, most of which are broken, are on the paving of a house under
construction. A wooden barrier surrounds the house. A water-filled can has
been left against the barrier; behind the barrier, the place under the tree
(at the corner of the crossroads, in front of the pedestrian crossing) where
Piero waited for and met with Vittoria, is now empty. Straw mats cover the
house and metal scaffolding pipes are outlined against the sky. The sulky
drawn by a horse trotting along passes along the deserted avenue; then, on
the opposite sidewalk, we see the nurse with the pram; their shadows glide
across the asphalt, dimly lit by a pale sun. Behind them, on the opposite
side of the avenue, the deserted ticket offices and stadium pylons can be
discerned. The pedestrian crossing leads to the house under construction;
the man crosses and disappears. The leaves of the trees are stirred by the
wind, and the deserted crossroads come into view (overall view, high-angle
shot). The house under construction is on one of the corners of the crossroads;
The Endless Endings of Michel angelo Antonioni’s Films 117

the sun has disappeared. The building-site can is f illed with water; on
its surface floats a piece of wood and the box of matches which Vittoria
and Piero discarded there during their first meeting; a stream of water
escapes from the pierced can and flows into the gutter. A woman waits at
the trolleybus stop under the trees. A young woman (a prostitute?) waits for
someone on a deserted corner of the crossroads. A trolleybus arrives, turns,
and then stops with squeaking wheels. A woman and a man get off; the man
opens a newspaper with the following headlines: “The atomic race” and “A
precarious peace”; the man walks off. Children are playing; some run toward
the sprinkler; a municipal worker closes the sprinkler; a few drops fall on
the leaves. There is a shot of a modern building with balconies; followed
by a close-up of one and then two of the balconies. A stadium pylon points
toward the sky where a plane passes, leaving a long, white trail behind it.
On the terrace of the white building, there are two tiny human figures: one
stretches out her arm in front of her, toward the sky. The can with the piece
of wood and box of matches is still leaking and the water is running slowly
across the pavement. At first, one sees only the bottom part of an old man’s
face, then an eye wearing glasses and, finally, the head; he is motionless
and seems to be looking at something, then walks away. We remain at the
corner of the house under construction. The stadium pylons stand out against
the cloudy sky, which is barely illuminated by the sun’s rays which are
disappearing below the horizon. There is a woman looking out from behind
bars; a streetlamp is switched on. One of the avenues of the crossroads has
lit streetlamps and cars, which have their headlights on; there is a shot of
the house under construction with scaffolding pipes pointing toward the
sky; another of the avenues has lit streetlamps. A trolleybus turns the corner
of the house under construction; it stops and several people get off, their
silhouettes moving away into the half-light. The corner of the crossroads is
lit by a small streetlamp; toward the back, the house under construction is
veiled by the now complete darkness of night; against the dark background
of the horizon, points of light are coming from the streetlamps which line
the avenue. A streetlamp, which diffuses an intense, luminous halo, fills the
entire screen with a blinding light and seems to project the word: “END.”
In this superb final sequence, Antonioni’s cinema reaches the extreme
point of the representation of the void toward which he has tended inces-
santly: places (or scenery) are emptied and exhausted in a fragmented
space devoid of quality, which the camera revisits without any support of
statement; characters suspend their adventure and withdraw to make way for
a vanishing presence, indifferent movements and the fleeting faces of silent,
anonymous figures; the story dissolves in the dispersion of heterogeneous
118 Stories

versions of the present (or microfacts), pure events – detached from any
diegetic purpose which finally drowns the diegesis in the world’s suspended
and extradiegetic time, a parallel world to that of the film, threatened, too,
by nothingness, by a total and universal eclipse.
This extinction of the narrative – what Pascal Bonitzer called “a spool of
nothing” (1982, 88) – is a type of probe which the filmmaker uses to create
mystery; a mystery which unpicks and loosens the weft of the story, perhaps
because, as Giorgio Agamben reminds us, “where there is mystery, there can
be no story” (2015, 15). Or, simply because, as Antonioni admitted himself:
“Any explication would be less interesting than mystery itself” (1985, 77).

Translated from the French by Naòmi Morgan.

References and Further Reading

Agamben, Giorgio. 2015. Le feu et le récit. Paris: Payot & Rivages.

Amengual, Barthélemy. 1964. “Dimensions existentialistes de La notte.” Études cinéma-
tographiques 18: 47-65.
Antonioni, Michelangelo. 1985. Rien que des mensonges. Translated by Sibylle Zavriew. Paris:
Jean-Claude Lattès.
Bonitzer, Pascal. 1982. Le champ aveugle: Essais sur le cinéma. Paris: Gallimard.
—. 1985. Décadrages: Peinture et cinéma. Paris: Editions de l’Etoile.
Ollier, Claude. 1981. Souvenirs écran. Paris: Gallimard.
8. The Film That Dreams
About David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Season 3

Dominique Chateau

I recently told a friend that I had found Twin Peaks Season 3 “admirable.”
He replied by asking whether I had seriously thought that admiration is
a genuine aesthetic criterion. Knowing my pride in being considered an
aesthetician, in the sense of practicing and teaching the discipline called
aesthetics, it was a way of touching my sensitivity. However, at the same time,
I was reminded of Charles Peirce envisaging the possibility of defining the
beautiful by admiration: “we appeal to the aesthete, to tell us what it is that
is admirable without any reason for being admirable beyond its inherent
character. Why, that, he replies, is the beautiful” (1931-1958, 1.612). Leaving
Peirce to his concerns – he immediately expresses doubts as to whether “any
particular quality of feeling is admirable without a reason” – I wonder if
admiring is not perhaps too much for a majority of beautiful things, insofar
as they achieve beauty in simplicity, without ostentatious features, but
with modesty. I mean that we must reserve admiration for special cases,
special beauty. When I say that Twin Peaks Season 3 is admirable, I wish
to express how I feel about it: this series is the most perfect and uncanny
audiovisual product I have ever seen.
However, it is not my intention to bore the reader with this kind of
manifestation of a pure subjective purpose. I am not alone in thinking
that Twin Peaks 3 is “the most perfect and uncanny audiovisual product.”
For example, Matt Fowler (2017) rightly points out that Twin Peaks “came
back as a true artistic force that challenged just about every storytelling
convention we know.” The uncanny feeling is based on some aspects of
the series that are objectively strange. Among these strange aspects of
characters and behavior, there is splitting – beginning with the splitting
of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) between Mr. C, a
doppelgänger, Cooper’s dark half brought out of the Black Lodge, and Dougie
Jones, ambiguously and partially linked to Dale and partially to Mr. C,
who is affected by a chronic language disorder, but who is surprisingly
charismatic at the same time. Aside from eccentric people, such as the
enigmatic Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) who always carries a small
log in her arms, there are very strange things, like The Arm, an electric
talking tree,1 a kind of “abhuman,” that is, “some indefinable ‘thing’ that is
120 Stories

mimicking the human, appropriating the human form” (Punter and Byron
2004, 41). Finally, it reflects another objective observation that Twin Peaks
3 presents a very special form of storytelling at different levels: diegesis,
story development, succession of scenes, rhythm (especially slow), dominant
coloring (red, black), and so on.
In this chapter, I draw on research derived from textual analyses of Twin
Peaks 3, using a theory of filmic storytelling, which is primarily based on
Gérard Genette’s narratology (distinguishing between diegesis, story, and
narration). Yet this also takes account of the diegetic perspective introduced
by Christian Metz (1974) – and, subsequently, endorsed by Genette (1972,
1980, 1982, 1983) – reworked in order to integrate the logic of possible worlds.2
This adjustment not only aims to “thicken” the concept of diegesis, but also
to help anchor my aesthetic quest for an answer to the question: What does it
mean to have a filmic idea? In relation to Twin Peaks, I will speak in terms
of film or cinema. Not only is it rather difficult in general to draw a clear
boundary between film and television series, but in Lynch’s case, starting
with the fact that as a filmmaker, he is an auteur, there are special reasons
to question this boundary. I will explain this in terms of “filmic ideas,”
meaning ideas in storytelling which do not involve a simple “packaging”
of optional sights and sounds, but rather deep structural work. This kind of
deep work which transforms the surface structure, or by which the surface
filmic form can also seize power over the deep semantic structures, results,
in the present case, from a dream-like form that goes beyond the dream’s
telling, toward the film that dreams. While Lynch did not invent this “genre,”
he raises it to the highest level.

Having a Filmic Idea

Although he did not exactly consider what I call filmic ideas, Gilles Deleuze
answered my question as follows:

An example of a cinematographic idea is the famous sight-sound dis-

sociation in the […] cinema of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the Straubs, and
Marguerite Duras, to take the best-known cases. What is common to
these, and in what sense is the disjunction of the visual and the auditory
a properly cinematic idea? Why could this not take place in theater?
Or, at least, if this happened in theater, if the theater found the means,
then one can say without exception that the theater borrowed it from
cinema. (1998, 16)
The Film That Dreams 121

In this proposition, the classical cinema-theater paragon is correlated with

exceptions observed in avant-garde films (more precisely the sight-sound
disjunction exception). Deleuze’s essay is entitled, “Having an Idea in
Cinema …” which, in French, is translated as: “Avoir une idée en cinema …”
I prefer “Having a filmic idea,” precisely because I agree with the presup-
position that the filmic (or cinematic) idea involves both filmic specificity
and an artistic intent which we do not find in every film.3 To give another of
my favorite examples, in the first part of Sergei Eisenstein’s General Line
(1929), two brothers, having decided to divide their poor heritage, a very
simple izba, saw it in half; it is, for Eisenstein, the occasion of a rhythmic
montage which accelerates progressively, until the moment when, among
the sawing shots, one of them very quickly appears upside down. The first
time I watched this movie, I thought: “Here is cinema! Here is cinema as art!”
I mean, the freedom to introduce a nonrealistic shot which, in this case, is
not a breach by a foreign image, but the transmutation of the realistic film
basis (this transmutation being supposed in Eisenstein’s mind to elicit the
ex-stasis process).
I compared that to my strong impression, which was constantly renewed
from episode to episode, as I was watching Twin Peaks 3. I would speak of
a masterpiece, especially with regard to Episodes 8 and 18, if the word was
not obsolete – thanks to Antonin Artaud! – and despite the fact that it is a
TV series. Yes, despite that, you read it right! I do not agree with researchers
who think they have the power to decide that a TV series deserves the same
level of respect as feature films or, more precisely, as feature films which
are judged “artistic works.” This label does not emerge from research, but
from society and the institutions involved (I fully agree with George Dickie’s
institutional theory (1974), which invents nothing, but simply takes note
of the fact that an artwork is such when a specialized institution supports
its application to art). When research participates in this legitimation it
is through an institution. With this in mind, I do not decide by myself to
apply the filmic idea viewpoint to a TV series, and I only agree with the
hypothesis that this viewpoint may be taken into consideration in the
case of a work which includes both feature film and TV episodes, which is
allegedly the case with Lynch.
To be more precise about the filmic idea, I refer to Kant’s Critique of
Judgment in which he writes that the principle of an artwork:

is nothing else than the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas. But, by

an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which
induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought
122 Stories

whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to it, and which language, con-
sequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely
intelligible. ([1890] 1911, para. 49)

I like the suggestion of something that “induces much thought,” but “which
language, consequently, can never […] render completely intelligible.” All
is in “completely.” This outlines the question of specificity, not as a pure
medium distinction, but as aesthetic features produced by the medium
or by an intermedial state. There are some kinds of representation which
are only complete in movies as much as some others are only complete in
writing, painting, and so on.
To avoid the exclusive medium dogmatism, we can recognize that the
filmic idea is not purely filmic, or “100% filmic” to use Dziga Vertov’s words.
Mikhail Iampolski (1998) shows in The Memory of Tiresias that French avant-
garde films, which were supposed to achieve a high level of filmic purity,
involved a literary subtext provided by the poetry of the time. And Yuri
Tsivian (1980, 118) shows that fully understanding the sequence of Vertov’s
Man with a Movie Camera (1929), where we see in alternate montage
seamstresses and the film cutter, implies referring to Russian lexical fields,
more precisely to the verb strotchit, which means both sewing and writing
(so that the film is implicitly defined as “cine-writing”).
To return to Twin Peaks 3, it is worth noting that it has some very clear
series characteristics, some features of seriality interwoven with filmic
ideas, for example the musical performances at the Roadhouse Bang Bang
Bar at the end of most of the episodes (and in the first third of Episode 8).
Incidentally, I do not want to become locked into the auteurism controversy.
We can speak of Lynch’s series because he is designated as the director, but
without forgetting that he shares the scenario writing with Mark Frost.
This means that the fantasies of this series, which includes many gems of
this type, are also shared. The author need not be a single human being.
Authorship is not a question of number, but rather of cultural purpose and
human approach.

Possible Worlds

When we consider Lynch’s entire work, we see both continuity and evolution.
The principle of diegetic continuity, especially that of characters (except when
new ones appear or when characters acquire new skill properties by means of
special narrative key events), not only governs each story but also spreads from
The Film That Dreams 123

one film to another and eventually to the entire work. This diegetic feature
must be linked to an obsessional characteristic which is difficult to miss: the
same characters, places, and themes appear constantly. A simple example
that Lynch’s fans would understand is agent Coop’s immoderate taste for
coffee and cherry-pie! The recurrence of such details is both a signature and
a principle of composition. An author’s preferences, as Freud (1991) suggested,
represent different aspects, even antagonistic ones, of his or her personality
that are assembled to constitute the book (or the film) as a good object.
Lynch’s works do not fit into any single genre classification. Cinema meets
the challenge of being led by a dominant genre. In other words, a single
genre is leading the story. However, in many cases, the supposed single
genre hides complexity: even though it is supposed to belong to cinema, it
is made up of a mixture of elements provided by the dominant genre and
others originating in at least another genre – such is the case, for instance,
with the well-known genre called film noir where we find typical elements of
melodrama. The kind of genre hybridity that Lynch exemplifies is somewhat
different from this customary interbreeding. The reason for this difference
lies in the fact that the key of hybridity is no longer a question of genre.
Neither is it the choice between pure and hybrid genre, nor, more precisely,
the choice of hybrid genre as an alternative to the gradually declining trend
of pure genres over the years. Beyond the question of genre, Lynch’s key
lies in filmic form. This does not imply a complete lack of genre, but that
the way in which Lynch conceives the story prompts a partial reversal of
relationships between diegesis and film.
A genre gives a specific framework to the film diegesis which also provides
more precise properties so that the viewer can figure out the time-space
conditions of the film and how the characters are supposed to behave within
these conditions. When watching a film, the main issue generally faced is
to understand the diegesis level vis-à-vis the world in which we live and the
other worlds, more or less ideal, we are able to conceive – in other words,
we need to identify a possible world which may be more or less close to our
own. This definition of diegesis must be taken into account when trying to
explain Lynch’s keys for Twin Peaks.
A possible world is one which is defined by a set of assumptions we can
more or less consider as assumptions of the world in which we live, not
only our present world but past ones as well. These present or past worlds
may be called the actual world, or the actual-like world. Admittedly, the
past and present worlds differ in the same way that a world with mobile
phones differs from one without. Nonetheless, we can assume that there is
a historical continuity between past and present. In developing the theory
124 Stories

of possible worlds in order to cover stories, it is appropriate to adapt it to

three types which can be defined as follows: a world comparable to the
actual world; a world partially incomparable to the actual world; and a
dream world. The first and second types share the feature of being portrayed
as real, either because the world is simply interpreted as reality-based,
or because the unreal facts or people it involves are supposed to work in
a reality-like context; the third type is explicitly portrayed as ideal. An
important question in terms of logic is how a possible world is accessible
to others. The first accessibility relation concerning a film is its relation
with our actual world or what we conceive as such. We will see that the
question of accessibility must also be considered as a very crucial one in the
heart of the film’s diegesis when this is the case, as in Twin Peaks, which
is composed of more than one possible world.
It seems relevant to consider Lynch’s work as a dream world. However,
this third type is inclusive, insofar as the representation of a dream world
needs to involve the reference to a reality-like world. Moreover, in Lynch’s
case, there is a permanent play with this status of the fantastic ambivalence
with regard to reality. To understand this point, it is useful to deepen the
functioning of diegetic postulates within the story context. If the story’s
diegesis involves the postulate of someone who is supposed to belong to
mankind and, at the same time, have a set of properties generally attributed
to birds, this means that this person’s behavior can incorporate, either
simultaneously or alternatively, the behavior of a human being and that
of a bird. For example, he or she can speak while flying. Nevertheless, the
birdman- or woman assumption, or any assumption considered to be a
diegetic one, needs to be understood very specifically within the framework
of a precise story. Diegesis works as an axiomatic framework that determines
the inferences underlying the story development. To give a very simple
example, if the birdman- or woman is pursued by someone who clearly
intends to kill him or her, we would be surprised if he or she forgot to fly
in order to escape this threat. It is clear that what should be considered as
nonactual, because it only belongs to the ideal and noneffective world of
imagination, becomes such an imperative logical law that fantastic behavior
(for example, flying) can be physically conceived as an actual ability (for
example, speaking). Edgar Morin writes that:

we experience the cinema in a state of double consciousness, […] an aston-

ishing phenomenon where the illusion of reality is inseparable from the
awareness that it is really an illusion, without, however, this awareness
killing the feeling of reality. (2005, 225)
The Film That Dreams 125

We could observe that this phenomenon of “double consciousness” is not really

astonishing, meaning simply that we can feel with the characters or about
the story while knowing that it is a film, and vice versa. In other words, the
knowledge that we are watching a film does not prevent us from experiencing
a wide range of feelings that we could have in reality (after all, watching a
film is part of reality). Moreover, in most films, feeling supersedes knowledge,
although, in a few, knowledge supersedes feeling. However, I do not wish
to refer to reflexiveness, the kind of films that teach us explicitly that they
are filmic or cinematic. The key to Lynch’s films does not lie in this didactic
approach, except very occasionally. Rather, his aim is to avoid any explicit
reflexivity by means of promoting reflection within a dream context. His
work has more to do with troubled consciousness than double consciousness.

Clues about Dreaming

To what extent can we speak of dreaming in Lynch’s work? A dream narrative

implies someone who dreams, yet a film does not come directly from someone.
Its author does not literally dream it. We therefore need first to identify some
clues that would justify the dream hypothesis, and then, unavoidably, face the
question: Who dreams? A film is not a dream, but a dream-like story or form
of storytelling. In general, such dream-like qualities are firstly due to special
diegetic postulates, so that there is always a dream element in every fiction
and, secondly, to illogical developments and inferences that differentiate
dream films from fantasy films. In a dream film, everything is permitted, even
if it appears illogical; whereas in the fantastic – because we do not refer to our
ordinary day-to-day experience, awake or not, but to what has been shaped
by literature and cinema, to books and films that develop extraordinary
diegeses – we are obliged to fulfill a logic of the plausible. In dream films,
based on our own experience of dreaming, we accept anomalies and logical
gaps. A part of this acceptance concerns the content of the dream, another,
its form. In terms of content, we could try to list the dream clues in Twin
Peaks, if this would not produce an endless list (it took four-and-a-half years
to make this new series). Let us therefore consider four of the most notable.

1. Double Doppelgänger
Gry Faurholt writes:

The doppelgänger is an uncanny motif comprising two distinct types: (1)

the alter ego or identical double of a protagonist who seems to be either
126 Stories

a victim of an identity theft perpetrated by a mimicking supernatural

presence, or subject to a paranoid hallucination; (2) the split personality or
dark half of the protagonist, an unleashed monster that acts as a physical
manifestation of a dissociated part of the self. (2009)

Generally, as Faurholt also notes, the difference between these two can
be considered “as a formal one only.” In Twin Peaks, Cooper has both a
döppelganger and his double, a kind of “double of the double,” who can be
considered his opposite. It sounds like ubiquity, three Coopers seeming to be
in different places at the same time, except that we cannot take for granted
that these places are in the same world. In terms of possible worlds, it seems
likely that such different worlds are parallel ones. Hypothetically then, for
a given world, somewhere there exists one or more parallel ones in which
the same people are acting, feeling, and thinking more or less differently. In
one of these parallel worlds, I am a physicist, in another, an estate agent, and
so on; and in one, I am writing a text for Stories, the next volume of AUP’s
Key Debates series, and giving a rather distorted account of Twin Peaks …
In this respect, Episode 3 Season 3 constitutes a diegetic node. Here, three
possible or parallel worlds interfere, while electricity creates an accessible
relationship between them. Electricity seems to be a materialization of the
possible link between these worlds, as well as that of a dialectical tension
between them. The fact that characters from different worlds are electrified
in relation to one another, and that the worlds communicate by means of
electrical discharges through plugs, materializes their dialectical tension.
In a sequence which mixes Star Wars with surrealist painting, Cooper is
on a strange machine in outer space, with a woman whose eyes are sewn
shut and whose words are incomprehensible. Pulling a lever then produces
an electrical discharge, which electrocutes her and she disappears into
space, before Cooper returns to the contraption. At this point, an alternate
or parallel montage begins, which shows Mr. C driving on a desert road.
Electrical spluttering is seen on the car’s dashboard, while Mr. C seems to
become sick. Cooper meets a woman who looks like Laura Palmer’s friend,
Ronette Pulaski, who says: “When you get there, you will already be there.
[…] You’d better hurry, my mother’s coming.” Electrical spluttering and an
obsessive pounding increase; Cooper’s face is distorted and he is sucked
into an electric machine, all apart from his shoes. Mr. C has more and more
difficulty driving and finally crashes his car. He is about to vomit, when,
through the broken windscreen of the car, we glimpse the red curtain of the
Black Lodge. Suddenly, at this moment, without any explanation, Cooper’s
second doppelgänger, who may also be Mr. C’s double, Dougie Jones, appears.
The Film That Dreams 127

The surest way to be disappointed is by trying to explain everything about

Twin Peaks. Indeed, I assume there is no way to grasp the endless network
built by Lynch from episode to episode, from detail to detail. Clearly, the
appearance of Dougie Jones amounts to an arbitrary plot twist, which is
retrospectively justified. We find the new character, Dougie, with Jade, a black
prostitute and, while she is taking a shower, Mr. C and Dougie alternate, both
being sick and vomiting. The red curtain intrudes in Dougie’s universe while he
is vomiting, and suddenly, he disappears, with jade hearing a loud noise (“What
the fuck was that?,” she says). Dougie, who is shown sitting in an armchair,
appears fleetingly through the dashboard and Mr. C vomits profusely. Back
in the Black Lodge, Dougie converses with MIKE, the one-armed spirit:

Dougie: What’s happening to me?

MIKE: Someone manufactured you.
Dougie: What?
MIKE: For a purpose, but I think now that’s been fulfilled.
Dougie: It has?

Dougie dissolves in a golden ring, saying: “That’s weird.” Then Jade finds Cooper
on the floor. The materialized Cooper is visibly frazzled by the transition
through the electric machine. And while it has made him more slow-witted
than the “real” Dougie, he has gained some special abilities and a thaumaturgic
gift. He will prove to be a very special wonder worker. Everything happens
now as if, having declined into a primitive state of understanding and com-
munication, he has acquired a kind of guru-like telepathic power over things
and others: Casino games, his wife (Naomi Watts), his boss (Don Murray), and
the casino’s owners, the Mitchum brothers (Robert Knepper and Jim Belushi).

2. Slowness
Episode 18 begins with short, disconnected sequences: Mr. C is on fire, suppos-
edly in the Black Lodge; Dougie returns home (in fact, a new Dougie created
by MIKE through electricity), and, at last, the “real” Cooper in the Black Lodge,
meets MIKE, The Arm, and Laura Palmer’s father (who says: “Find Laura!”).
Now, while Cooper is with Diane, outside the Black Lodge, in the woods, a
rhythmic slowdown begins. What must be emphasized in this regard is the fact
that this kind of slowdown is as significant as short sequences with more or less
fast cutting. It is true that illogical gaps and strange disturbances frequently
occur in a dream, as do scary slow phases. Fantasizing requires slowing down,
insofar as it involves a process of interplay between attraction and repulsion.
Completely opposed to what we are conditioned to expect by the dominant
128 Stories

trend in TV drama series, Lynch’s directing of actions and actors aims to

reduce the storytelling rhythm. What he dares in this regard is extreme, the
most extreme of which seems to be the car journeys in Episode 18, especially
the third one. Cooper is now with Laura Palmer or, more precisely, with a
woman he regards as her. Drawn to her by some evidence, Cooper meets this
woman at her house, where there is a murdered man he overlooks – this lack
of any reaction on behalf of an FBI agent is among the most explicit dream
clues that should make the spectator think about the form of the film. The
spectator could think that we were again in a first degree diegesis, since
Cooper seemed to be conducting a police investigation. Still, it is no longer
possible to maintain that belief. This is not the only strangeness, however. The
investigation itself is not devoid of anomalies; rather, it is a matter of degree.
Suddenly, the suspicion of the dream goes up a notch, and then there is an
interminable road trip … Cooper and Laura, side by side; a lacunary monologue
by the woman; a hypnotic glide along a dark road lit by fleeting headlights …

3. Details: Insignificant or Not?

Details that seem at first sight to be negligible, become important through
recurrence: the green ring, the golden seed, the log, and so on. As we know,
details are very important in a dream. Moreover, in Freudian theory, details
are more important than what would otherwise be considered the main
story elements. Freud (1933) called the mechanism that brings such details
to the fore displacement. Even if we ignore the technical details of such an
unconscious operation, especially the different strata of (un)consciousness
involved, the process referred to by Freud as a “shifting accent” is very similar
to what happens in Twin Peaks:

The different ideas in dream-thoughts are […] not all of equal value;
they are cathected with quotas of affect of varying magnitude and are
correspondingly judged to be important and deserving of interest to a
greater or less degree. In the dream-work these ideas are separated from
the affects attaching to them. The affects are dealt with independently;
they may be displaced on to something else, they may be retained, they
may undergo alterations, or they may not appear in the dream at all. The
importance of the ideas that have been stripped of their affect returns
in the dream as sensory strength in the dream-pictures; but we observe
that this accent has passed over from important elements to indifferent
ones. Thus something that played only a minor part in the dream-thoughts
seems to be pushed into the foreground in the dream as the main thing,
while, on the contrary, what was the essence of the dream-thoughts finds
The Film That Dreams 129

only passing and indistinct representation in the dream. No other part of

the dream-work is so much responsible for making the dream strange and
incomprehensible to the dreamer. Displacement is the principal means
used in the dream-distortion to which the dream-thoughts must submit
under the influence of the censorship. (1953-1974, 9-10)

We could say: no other part of the dream-work is as responsible for making the
film strange and incomprehensible to the spectator. This is one reason why I
will consider film distortions in the next section. For the moment, I am mainly
interested in the different aspects that are analogical to dream-work in the
Twin Peaks story. More precisely, we could speak of Twin Peaks’ stories,
since it is clear that, starting from the central nerve of Laura Palmer’s murder
investigation, Lynch has created a kind of narrative network which might
be compared to a neural one, just as some computing systems inspired by
the human neural network provide a model for artificial neural networks.4
These are also called “connectionist systems” because of the multiplicity
and complexity of connections they involve (like brain synapses). In Twin
Peaks, it is as though narrative or thematic signals can be transmitted from
one to another, and instead of looking for a clear significance which marks
the end of the process, it would be better to understand that the network
opens many doors to unresolved hypotheses.
To give some examples, in Episode 18, the car that Cooper drives to the
motel is not the same as the one in which he leaves after making love with
Diane. He drives 430 miles to the motel, crossing over an electrical field and,
after having sex, he wakes up in the motel room which Diane left, apparently
after having left a note that reads “To Richard from Linda.” At the beginning
of Episode 1, a character identified as The Fireman, who resembles The Giant
of the previous Twin Peaks seasons (because he is played by the same
actor, Carel Struycken) provides cryptic clues, telling Cooper in the Black
Lodge to remember “430 and Richard and Linda!” This kind of information,
gathered in various places throughout the series, creates assumptions and
expectations, which do not, however, insert definite decryption keys into
the narrative locks, but establish telestructures that enrich the network,
both narratively and aesthetically (Chateau and Jost 1979).5 Apart from
these discontinuous structures, strange additional information, in the
form of images and sounds, seems to be largely interspersed to intensify
the weirdness. Examples include Dougie’s habit of repeating the last word
uttered by those to whom he is talking as way of answering, and the way
in which the FBI agent, Gordon Cole (played by David Lynch), who suffers
hearing loss, speaks very loudly.
130 Stories

4. Story Derivations
Film networks remain embryonic only unless there is some syntagmatic work
in the end.6 Film cannot exist without syntagmatizing some paradigmatic
choices governed by a diegesis. A film has a more or less sophisticated
paradigmatic structure governed by a diegetic possible world, but it is also
composed by combining and interlacing story sequences which comply more
or less with the statutory requirements that can be inferred from the diegesis.
It may be something very simple, like an everyday diegesis with people acting
as we might do, regardless of the psychological complexity of the characters.
Or it may be more complicated, partly because the diegesis mentioned
earlier involves special postulates and underpins a complicated network,
and partly because the story itself is made up of many paths significantly
branching away, more or less, from the main path (if indeed that exists). In
addition to Twin Peaks’ main path, the inquiry into Laura Palmer’s murder,
there are many secondary interconnected paths that make the story denser,
while simultaneously creating ambiguities, especially in relation to genre.
The question, “What happened to Audrey?” provides a clear example of the
secondary paths in Twin Peaks. At the end of Series 2 (Episode 30), Audrey
(Sherilyn Fenn) has chained herself to a grid near the vault of the Twin Peaks
Savings & Loan bank, in protest of an environmental problem, when a bomb
explodes. Audrey disappeared at the end of the series. Twenty-five years later,
discussions on the Internet show that spectators are still concerned about this
way of eliminating an attractive character. They had to wait until Episode 7
of Series 3 for a scene with Tommy “Hawk” Hill (Michael Horse) and Frank
Truman (Robert Forster) to see her again. Hawk and Frank examine the
pages in which Annie tells Laura that the good Dale is trapped in the Black
Lodge. Frank says: “Laura never met Cooper. He came here after she died,
didn’t he?” Hawk answers: “She said that these words from Annie came to
her in a dream.” Having realized that the Cooper coming back from the Black
Lodge could be the “wrong” one, Frank calls Doc Hayward by means of Skype.

Doc: We all knew Coop, but that morning he was acting mighty strange.
[… ] I took him to the hospital […]. About an hour later, I saw him sneaking
out of intensive care, fully dressed.
Frank: What was he doing in intensive care?
Doc: I thought at the time he might have been looking in on Audrey Horne.
That terrible business at the bank, and … She was in a coma.

Audrey then reappears under strange conditions. She is back, but seems
to be in a kind of prison, chained once again and engaged in an endless
The Film That Dreams 131

Fig. 8.1: Twin Peaks Season 3 by David Lynch, frames from Episodes 1 and 3.

discussion with her husband, Charlie. Charlie is a very strange character

whose physical aspect (he suffers from rheumatoid arthritis) is provided by
the actor, Clark Middleton (Episodes 12, 13, 15, and 16.) Audrey is obsessed
with joining her lover, Billy, at the Roadhouse, but she and Charlie, who
are continually arguing, seem unable to go. In Episode 16, due to Charlie’s
decision, they are finally at the Roadhouse, where Audrey dances in the
middle of the crowd after a master of ceremonies (JR Starr) has announced
“Audrey’s dance.” However, a fight breaks out and, feeling afraid, Audrey asks
Charlie to leave. Prefaced by electric spluttering, we see her alone in a room,
before a mirror in which she looks at herself with fear. All these details seem
to be building a parallel story, a subsidiary offshoot of the main one. But
two important details show that this is not the case. Episode 13 is entitled:
“What Story Is That, Charlie?” In this episode, Audrey asks: “What story is
that, Charlie? Is it the story of the little girl who lived down the lane?” The
last clue which refers to Audrey, and which occurs in Episode 18 inside the
Black Lodge, contributes to clarifying that Audrey’s secondary story in Twin
Peaks 3 has to do with the main story. Indeed, The Arm, the electric tree
with a fleshy mass instead of a head, says to Cooper in its disembodied, jerky
voice: “It is … the story … of the little girl … who lived down the lane … Is it?”

The Film That Dreams

The following appears on an Internet forum:7

When he was pressed over the fate of Audrey Horne […] Lynch remained
typically tight-lipped: “What matters is what you believe happened. Many
132 Stories

things in life just happen and we have to come to our own conclusions.
You can, for example, read a book that raises a series of questions, and
you want to talk to the author, but he died a hundred years ago. That’s
why everything is up to you.

This seems to provide a valuable key for overall interpretation. People have
different memories of the episodes, different awareness of the relevance
of various details and clues to issues regarding interpretation. However,
the most important aspect of Twin Peaks is that this artwork has been
purposefully made with the intention of providing spectators with a network
of enigmas. One possible approach is to try to crack the enigmas systematic­
ally. The Internet is a breeding ground for such exercises, but the dice are
loaded against anyone trying to impose their own interpretation. According
to Lynch, what counts is the personal belief that we form about the enigmas,
trying to solve them and, above all, enjoying the mental process which they
activate, even if this does not lead to any definitive end.
I think that the major obstacle encountered by interpreters stems from the
limited range of diegetic conceptions which are available for Twin Peaks. It
is clear that the series does not refer to a “reality” diegesis, a possible world
whose assumptions match our expectations about the world in which we
live. We would be very surprised to see someone dissolve into a seed, like
Diane in Episode 16! It is obviously not realistic, but depends on the diegetic
logic, as we saw earlier with the birdman- or woman postulate. Furthermore,
given a diegesis, we need to know whether the assumptions, however special,
continue to operate on a basis of reality. With Twin Peaks, it would be a
huge mistake to use this kind of basis for solving the enigmas. These two
mistakes can be avoided if we consider the series as a dream. Admittedly,
dreaming is part of our real experience, but only when the conditions of our
waking consciousness are suspended. In such a context, the logic, according
to which the birdman- or woman must fly to escape some assailant, may be
suspended. In Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), the dinner
party guests are unable to return home for no apparent reason. In the same
vein, Audrey cannot go to the Roadhouse despite her desire to join Billy. In
our dreams, it is not uncommon to be desperately moving toward a point
which is impossible to reach.
Dream contextualizing not only changes the diegetic logic, but also has
some crucial consequences for storytelling. Generally in films, a dream that
is being told or visualized is ascribed to some character. Some parts of Twin
Peaks 3 fall within this category. As we have seen, Hawk and Frank read
the pages in which Annie describes her dream about Cooper being trapped
The Film That Dreams 133

in the Black Lodge. In Episode 14, entitled “We Are like the Dreamer,” what
happens is most important. Gordon Cole tells agents Tammy and Albert:

Last night, I had another Monica Bellucci dream. I was in Paris on a case.
Monica called and asked me to meet her at a certain cafe. She said she
needed to talk to me. When we met at the cafe, Cooper was there. But I
couldn’t see his face. Monica was very pleasant. She had brought friends.
We all had a coffee.

Gordon speaks sometimes in vision, and sometimes in voice-over, the

sequence being an alternating syntagm showing the deputies meeting
in color, with some scenes described by the FBI chief in black and white.
Gordon continues: “And then she said the ancient phrase …” We see and
hear Monica saying: “We’re like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside
the dream.” Gordon repeats: “We’re like the dreamer who dreams and lives
inside the dream.” Then he adds: “I told her I understood. And then she said
…” Monica whispers, in close up: “But who is the dreamer?” Gordon repeats:
“But who is the dreamer?” And he adds:

A very powerful uneasy feeling came over me. Monica looked past me,
and indicated to me to look back at something that was happening there.
I turned and looked. I saw myself. I saw myself from long ago in the old
Philadelphia offices listening to Cooper telling me he was worried about
a dream he had.

Gordon and Cooper are now face to face, in black and white. Cooper: “Gordon,
it’s 10:10 a.m. on February 16. I was worried about today because of the dream
I told you about.” Gordon again, in color: “And that was the day Phillip
Heffries appeared and didn’t appear …” Phillip Jeffries, played by David
Bowie, appears in black and white.
With Gordon seeing himself as younger, and dreaming about Cooper,
who tells him about a dream, this part of Episode 14 seems to give a double
key: the dreamer living inside his dream and a dream within a dream. On
this basis, one can entertain quite an interesting hypothesis: Twin Peaks
is Gordon’s dream. However, given the fact that Gordon is played by David
Lynch, another interesting hypothesis would be that Twin Peaks is Lynch’s
dream. In fact, when we say that an artwork is the dream of its author, we
assert this on a metaphorical level. A film is not a dream; it is neither the
mental activity of dreaming, nor a dream narrative; and even more so, the
film’s author is not the film’s dreamer. The only way to substitute the literal
134 Stories

for the metaphorical here would be to propose that the film itself dreams,
meaning that it has a structure analogous to that of a dream. This hypothesis
is clearly consistent with the idea that this kind of film subverts the logic
of diegetic “reality.”
Accordingly, if dreaming is regarded as structural, we need to identify
clues of correspondence between the diegetic material and the filmic form.
To return to Episode 3, in the beginning, the film itself suffers electric
discharges. An alternating or parallel montage begins at this point. Two
series of images alternate when one image succeeds another according to a
narrative relation, while parallel images create a discursive relation. Can we
assume that the intruding series, which shows Mr. C driving on a desert road,
has a narrative relation with the series inside the Black Lodge? We cannot
be sure that the Black Lodge temporality is a narrative one, by which I mean
following the diegetic temporality designed to be considered normal. We
could name this sequence half alternating, half bringing together parallel
worlds – a shaky syntagm. A new alternation begins. The new series may
be considered as signifying in the meantime more precisely than the first
alternation. Three worlds and stories are now intertwining more or less
simultaneously. As already noted, electricity creates accessibility between
the three worlds so that it works both in the deep structure governed by
the diegesis and in the surface structure of filmic form. Nevertheless, if it
is the film that dreams, we may perhaps reverse the proposition: insofar
as the electric conditioning defines the filmic form, Twin Peaks’ story and
diegesis are determined in the first instance by the author’s filmic idea. The
extrapolation of Kant’s aesthetic idea to a filmic idea is clearly relevant in
this case: something inducing thought, but inexpressible. It is symbolized
by the woman whose eyes have been sewn shut and who merely whispers,
within an electrified montage of choppy images accompanied by crackles,
reverberations and, finally, loud pounding. When Cooper asks: “Where is
this? Where are we?,” the spectator feels bewildered. He or she wonders
whether this part of the f ilm is a rough draft, the sketch of a possible
complete film.
Even though film is not literally a dream, in the sense that it is neither
dreaming nor following the narrative of its own dream, the spectator who
is well disposed toward a film, can have the experience of a dream while
watching it. He or she has the feeling that he or she is dreaming, beyond
the double consciousness that allows such empathic participation, despite
awareness of the filmic dispositif. I will not invoke the filmic apparatus
theories that identify it with a dream, and the moviegoer with a dreamer.
There is a huge difference between the assumption that the filmic apparatus
The Film That Dreams 135

is an ideological tool, because the viewer cannot differentiate between the

filmic world and the real one – when the diegesis is supposed to be reality
– and such films as Twin Peaks, where the filmic world is distinguished
from the real one by a number of esoteric clues that progressively complicate
the neural network, both at the level of diegesis and story.

The Sublime and the Grotesque (By Way of Conclusion)

Episodes 8 and 18 are unbelievable, not only because they involve strange
things, but also due to Lynch’s artistic daring in stretching his filmic ideas.
I know that there are some who wonder whether numerology is involved in
Twin Peaks. Despite the fact that I was born on August 18 (8/18) in 1948, I
do not know what I could do with this numerical conjunction. Still, when
I spoke earlier about admiration, I particularly had these two episodes in
mind. I have already analyzed Episode 18, the last one (last of the last?),
and only need to mention the final scream. Accompanied by the supposed
Laura, Cooper finds Palmer’s house now occupied by strangers. At this
point, when we come back to the kind of FBI investigation which was the
main narrative path of the earlier series, Cooper fails completely. However,
his attitude indicates that this is unimportant or, at least, less important
than the dream-like mood and structure. He gives up, slowly goes down the
steps and walks along the street with Laura, before turning round, leaning
forward, and asking the surprisingly simple question: “What year is this?”
Then we hear a distant voice calling “Laura.” In close-up, the supposed
Laura screams, Cooper jumps and the house lights go out. This is the end of
the last episode, abruptly broken by a kind of power cut, emphasizing the
sublimity of this primal scream … except after the credits, there is a shot
of Laura whispering in Cooper’s ear – perhaps there is hope for a future
Twin Peaks sequel.
Episode 8 is probably the best of all the Twin Peaks series. It responds to
Episode 29 in Series 2, entitled “Beyond Life and Death,” like black responding
to red. Among other meanings, in the Middle Ages, red evoked Christ’s blood
and Hell’s fire; and as a symbol of darkness before the days of creation, black
refers to primitive terror (Pastoureau 2016). The Black Lodge is in red and,
in Episode 8, night-time terror covers the earth. It might also be considered
the final explanation: in 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated at White
Sands, New Mexico at 5:29 a.m. This was accompanied, after the countdown,
by Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), as
well as an abstract suite of color explosions, like fireworks. It explains,
136 Stories

among other enigmatic parts of Episode 8, the phantom-like woodsman

occupied by Mr. C’s body after he was shot, then terrifying a couple in a
car, and killing people in a radio station (while we hear The Platters’ The
Prayer), and broadcasting a mysterious quasi-Biblical message: “This is the
water. And this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white
of the eyes and dark within,” which causes listeners to faint.
But it does not explain Lynch’s decision to develop a very special filmic
idea and to extend it throughout the entire episode. Dream turns to night-
mare, and the film turns abstract for a long, absolutely unusual, time. The
Twin Peaks’ audience does not faint, but is hypnotized by this never-ending
nightmare, contemplating the night-time terror it represents. We could
wonder how it is possible to do that in the context of TV production, but it
is better to simply enjoy being led by image and music that gradually bring
us to a mysterious state, as enigmatic as the dark electrified images of the
gas station. I do not know of any film or series which has taken a filmic
idea to such extremes, except Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie (1972), that we can consider one of the best examples of a film
that dreams, especially the dream within a dream as filmic structuration.
“Dreaming is a second life” wrote Gérard de Nerval ([1855] 2001). If it
means that a dream is real life reinterpreted, or another kind of life from
the real one, it remains possible to distinguish reality and dream. In the
cases of Buñuel and Lynch, dream representation is no longer supposed
to occur in a real context from which it is distinguishable, because they
develop dreams concretely; they develop them according to their proper
mechanisms (sometimes called “dream work”), through the concreteness of
filmic forms. Dream and reality become indistinguishable, so that fiction
floats between them. The question is no longer the representation of a
mental world, but the representation of the world as mental. Aesthetically,
the mental or dream logic upon which the film depends is confirmed by
values which we also find in films governed by a reality-diegesis, but with
a very different purpose. The everyday has a role to play in the film that
dreams: Coop’s taste of coffee and cherry-pie are pleasures to be enjoyed
every day; at the same time, these needs are so obsessional that we come to
feel them as uncanny. Freud defined the uncanny as created “on the ground
of common reality,” and added:

By doing so [the writer] adopts all the conditions that apply to the
emergence of a sense of the uncanny in normal experience […]. But the
writer can intensify and multiply this effect far beyond what is feasible
in normal experience; in his stories he can make things happen that
The Film That Dreams 137

one would never, or only rarely, experience in real life […]. [H]e tricks us
by promising us everyday reality and then going beyond it. (2003, n.p.)

We know the process of defamiliarizing by unusual repetition (whereas, as

Shklovsky put it when he coined the concept of ostranenie, deautomatization
also has the power to produce the same effect) (Shklovsky [1917] 1965; Van
den Oever 2010). In dream film, some moments are highly differentiated
from the sublime, as we have seen in the whole of Episode 8 or with Laura’s
scream at the end of Episode 18. But what is the sublime? Edmund Burke
answers: “Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible
objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror” (1909-1914, n.p.).
Another value, the grotesque, which seems very close to the everyday,
interferes with it, thus emphasizing the ambiguous relationship between
strangeness and the familiar. Many texts have been written on this topic,
especially with regard to Lynch (McTaggart 2010; Mulvey 1996; Schneider
2004; Weishaar 2012). In fact, it is difficult to grapple with the subject at the
end of this present chapter, but in my opinion “the grotesque and the sublime
in Twin Peaks” would be an attractive issue to address in a future essay.
Therefore, I wish to offer a few pointers here. Coop’s gourmet obsession is
somewhat grotesque, as is Gordon’s way of talking loudly, or the way in which
the Log Lady holds her precious piece of wood against her heart. In Twin
Peaks, there are numerous examples of such small discrepancies disturbing
everyday life. This kind of grotesque playing with familiarity, as a kind of
unfamiliar familiarity, makes the viewer hesitate between laughing and
feeling the uncanny. Film, as a dream, is a particular context in which the
grotesque and the sublime may communicate or amalgamate without losing
their strengths; in fact, they may reinforce each other. Among the former,
the sheriff’s Deputy, Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz), a Stanley Laurel figure, is
a very sensitive grotesque character (a police officer who cries easily) who
has a grotesque relationship with Lucy (Kimmy Robertson), the shrill-voiced
immature Sheriff’s Department receptionist. However, in Episode 14, he is
literally transfigured by his passage through the Black Lodge. Coming to the
woods with Frank, Hawk, and Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), having held
the eyeless woman’s hand, he is transported into the Black Lodge, where
the Fireman shows him visions of many aspects of the story, including BOB,
woodsmen, Laura, two Coopers, and himself. A grotesque figure becomes
sublime. Even Lucy becomes mature on this occasion. And Lynch gives
Andy the honor of welcoming Cooper and bringing him to his doppelgänger.
As I have tried to argue in this chapter, in Twin Peaks 3, this kind of
reversibility not only deals with the routine of the fantastic (the simple
138 Stories

development of a special diegesis), but also with the dreamlike form that is
the main characteristic of the film that dreams genre. Annie van den Oever
asserts that “the experience of the grotesque […] is not merely or exclusively
a perceptual experience of grotesque (fused, hybrid, monstrous) beings; it
is, more fundamentally, an experience of the distorting powers of the new
technologies themselves effectively ‘working’ on the percipients in the
perceptual process and destabilizing their notion of images, representa-
tions, beings and meanings” (2011, 101-102). In my opinion, it is relevant
to extend this technical hypothesis to film form, conceived as a way of
appropriating film technique through filmic ideas. If one tries to master
Twin Peaks’ diegetic network and complex story without considering its
special dreamlike form one will inevitably be disappointed.
Whether considered from the standpoint of story or technique, the film
that dreams genre makes it possible to identify the series as a movie, justify-
ing my quest for filmic ideas in Twin Peaks 3. “I’ve heard that you think
of it as an 18-hour movie, not a series as such”: I recently discovered that
Lynch has already replied to this interviewer’s remark:

I always saw working in television as the same as working on a film. It is a

film. So when I shot the pilot for Twin Peaks, way back when, I just saw it
as a short film. The pilot was not that short; it was a feature film, it just
had an open ending. And the same thing goes with this – it’s a film. It’s
broken into parts. (2017a)

Notes

1. Previously The Man from Another Place, played by Michael J. Anderson, in

four episodes and in the prequel Fire Walk with Me (1992).
2. Possible world semantics have been created in order to complete modal
logic, i.e., logic of the possible and the necessary. Something is possible if it
is true in one possible world, and it is necessary if it is true in all the possi-
ble worlds. About the logical background, see: Hughes and Cresswell (1972);
about the application to story, see Eco (1979); Chateau (1976, 1983, 2015).
3. By the way, sight-sound dissociation is already in Eisenstein, Poudovkine,
and Alexandrov’s ”Statement on the Sound-film” (1928), a manifesto con-
ceived as a weapon against the fascination that the introduction of sound,
and especially word, might exert on the spectators: “The first experimental
work with sound must be directed along the line of its distinct non-syn-
chronization with the visual images” (Eisenstein 1949, 258).
The Film That Dreams 139

4. Hence, recently, the idea to apply a neural network to planet discovery,

“Artificial Intelligence, NASA Data Used to Discover Eighth Planet Circling
Distant Star,” https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/artificial-intelligence-
nasa-data-used-to-discover-eighth-planet-circling-distant-star.
5. “Telestructures,” or discontinuous structures are relations established
between different parts of a film (or a novel) that constitute a narrative
structure or present a structural analogy. See Chateau and Jost (1979).
6. Syntagmatic versus paradigmatic is a linguistic concept introduced into
film theory by Christian Metz. It aims to distinguish the story choices
related to the diegesis from the relationship between story parts that occur
within the same filmic construction.
7. http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/tv/twin-peaks/51236/twin-peaks-lynch-
breaks-his-silence-on-season-4-possibility.

References and Further Reading

Burke, Edmund. 1909-1914. “Of the Sublime.” In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, with Several Other Additions, Harvard Classics. Vol. 24,
Part 2. New York: P.F. Collier & Son. http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/107.html.
Chateau, Dominique. 1976. “La sémantique du récit.” Semiotica 18, no. 3.
—. 1983. “Diégèse et énonciation.” Communications 38.
—. 2015. Théorie de la fiction. Mondes possibles et logique narrative. Paris: L’Harmattan, Eidos.
Série retina.
Chateau, Dominique, and François Jost. 1979. Nouveau cinéma, nouvelle sémiologie. Essai d’analyse
des Films d’Alain Robbe-Grillet. Paris: 10/18, Éditions de Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. “Avoir une idée en cinéma: À propos du cinéma des Straub-Huillet.” In
Hölderlin, Cézanne, edited by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Lédignan: Éditions
Antigone.
—. 1998. “Having an Idea in Cinema (On the cinema of Straub-Huillet).” In Deleuze & Guattari:
New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, edited by Eleanor Kaufman, and Kevin
Jon Heller, translated by Eleanor Kaufman, 16. Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press.
Dickie, George. 1974. Art and Æsthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form. Essays in Film Theory. Translated by Jay Leyda. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World.
Eisenstein, Sergei, Vsevolod Poudovkine, and Grigori Alexandrov. 1928. “Statement on the
Sound-f ilm.” In Film Form. Essays in Film Theory. Translated by Jay Leyda, 257-260. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Faurholt, Gry. 2009. “Self as Other. The Doppelgänger.” Double Dialogues, Approaching Otherness,
no. 10 (Summer). http://www.doubledialogues.com/article/self-as-other-the-doppelganger/.
Foubert, Jean. 2010. L’Art audio-visuel de David Lynch. Paris: L’Harmattan, Champs visuels.
—. 2017. Twin Peaks et ses mondes. Paris: L’Harmattan, Champs visuels.
Fowler, Matt. 2017. “Twin Peaks: The Return Review.” http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/09/11/
twin-peaks-the-return-review.
140 Stories

Freud, Sigmund. 1953-1974 [1933]. “Revision of the Theory of Dreams.” In New Introductory
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Lecture XXIX, translated by James Strachey. Vol. XXII of The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1932-1936). London:
Hogarth. https://manhattanpsychoanalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/readings/Subra-
manian_Freud_II_upload/Freud_New_Introductory_Lectures_On_Psycho_Analysis.pdf.
—. 1991. “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” In On Metapsychology.
The Theory of Psychoanalysis, edited by Angela Richards, translated by James Strachey,
29-44. London: Penguin Books.
—. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. New York: Penguin.
Genette, Gérard. 1972. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, Poétique.
—. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
—. 1982. Palimpsestes. Paris: Seuil, Poétique.
—. 1983. Nouveau Discours du récit. Paris: Seuil, Poétique.
Hughes, G.E., and M.J. Cresswell. 1972. An Introduction to Modal Logic. London: Methuen and Co.
Iampolski, Mikhail. 1998. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Translated by Marsha
Ram. Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1911 [1890]. Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. http://www.denisdutton.com/kant_third_critique.htm#translation.
Lynch, David. 2017a. “David Lynch Travels Back to ‘Twin Peaks’: ‘The Story Was Not Over’ — Dead-
line Disruptors.” Interview by Danon Wise. Deadline Hollywood, May 19, 2017. http://deadline.
com/2017/05/twin-peaks-david-lynch-cannes-showtime-disruptors-news-​1 202090469/.
—. 2017b. “Exclusive Interview with David Lynch.” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 739 (December).
McTaggart, Allister. 2010. “‘It Is Happening Again: Experiencing the Lynchian Uncanny.” In The
Film Paintings of David Lynch. Challenging Film Theory. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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nasa-data-used-to-discover-eighth-planet-circling-distant-star.
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9. Spoilers, Twists, and Dragons
Popular Narrative after Game of Thrones

Sandra Laugier

“It’s not TV, it’s HBO” was the slightly pretentious slogan offered by the cable
channel in 1997, in what now appears to have been a golden age of the TV
series. Sex and the City (1998-2004), The Sopranos (1999-2007), Six Feet
Under (2001-2005), Entourage (2004-2011), and The Wire (2002-2008)
were series that have changed our way of seeing the world, as well as the
social status of these singular works, which have often been neglected on
account of their mass-market appeal. After a short period during which
it seemed as though the channel might be overtaken by other networks
(AMC with Mad Men, 2007-2015 and Breaking Bad, 2008-2013), HBO
regained its control of the series culture with Girls (2012-2017) and Game
of Thrones (2011- ) – two series that are really unlike all others. However,
I am discussing Game of Thrones (GoT) here, because you do not have
to be a fan of medieval fantasy, bloody fights, dragons, or soft porn; you do
not need to love the sagas of George R.R. Martin to be a fan of Game of
Thrones. You do not even have to like “series.”
Cult HBO series such as The Wire, which are comparable to the great
cinematic or literary works, remained television, or even “super television”
for the discerning spectator exploiting the expressive and narrative resources
of the small screen. They gave the TV series its “nobility,” turning a favorite
pastime into an object of study, even of erudition and distinction, while also
allowing for an element of subjective exploration and self-identification.
Stanley Cavell (1979, 1981, 1997, 2004) has def ined philosophy as the
“education of grownups,” in parallel with his goal in his major works on
cinema – The World Viewed, Pursuits of Happiness (on remarriage comedies),
and Contesting Tears (on melodrama) – to give popular culture (Hollywood
movies, in particular, are his main interest) the function of changing us.
According to Cavell, the value of a culture does not lie in its “great art”
but in its transformative capacity, the same capacity found in the “moral
perfectionism” of Emerson and Thoreau. Cavell’s philosophy defines growth
– once childhood and physical growth are over – as our capacity to change.
And this capacity is manifestly at work in Cavell’s favored object of study,
144 Stories

the apparently minor genre of remarriage comedies, which stage characters’

mutual education and transformation through separation and reunion:

In this light, philosophy becomes the education of grownups. […] The

anxiety in teaching, in serious communication, is that I myself require
education. And for grownups, this is not natural growth, but change.
(Cavell 1979a)

Cavell (2004) also gives this philosophical enterprise the old-fashioned name
of “moral education,” or “pedagogy,” as in the subtitle to Cities of Words. For
Cavell, whose childhood and youth were haunted by Hollywood movies,
the culture in question is popular cinema, whose productions reached
the greatest number at the time. The educational value of popular culture
is not anecdotal. Indeed, it seems to def ine what must be understood
both by “popular” and “culture” (in the sense of Bildung) in the expression
“popular culture.” From this perspective, the vocation of popular culture
is the philosophical education of a public rather than the institution and
valorization of a socially targeted corpus. The way in which Cavell has
claimed the philosophical value of mainstream Hollywood cinema in
the 1970s, whose task was to educate adolescents and adults, has been
transferred to television series, which have taken over from cinema, if
not replaced it.
A genre such as remarriage comedies provides an expressive grammar for
the spectator, who finds within it resources for his or her own sentiments
and situations. This ordinary pedagogical aspect has been radicalized in
television series, which are explicitly sites of ordinary expression. They are,
themselves, fed by moments of conversation in recent or classic comedies,
which make up their referential and moral universe. The spectator’s ordi-
nary expertise turns out to be a capacity for expression that comes from
knowledge, even mastery, of a genre. A genre is not an essence – its worth
lies in the expressive possibilities which it opens up for actors and spectators.
Thus, the remarriage comedy genre proposes a grammar of moral education.
The democratic nature of cinema and television series is also found in this
capacity for education. This is because, as Cavell notes, popular cinema and
TV show the important moments of life, when life changes imperceptibly
– moments which, in real life, are fleeting and indeterminate, or whose
importance it takes years or an entire lifetime to understand. In order to
rethink the concept of popular culture, it is necessary to understand that
cinema is not a specialized art, and that it can transform our existences by
educating our ordinary experience.
Spoilers, Twists, and Dr agons 145

Cavell bases his hermeneutic work on “the intelligence that a film has
already brought to bear in its making” (Cavell 1981, 10). The perspective
he introduces with regard to popular cinema and the demand it places on
criticism is, in my opinion, equally valid for television series such as GoT. The
success of these series comes from the fact that they are polyphonic. They
contain a plurality of singular expressions, stage arguments and debates,
and are permeated by a moral atmosphere.
Compared to television series produced at the beginning of the 1990s (ER,
The West Wing), a radical change took place in terms of the very form in
which they are presented: viewers are initiated into new forms of life and
new, initially opaque vocabularies that are not made explicit, without any
heavy-handed guidance or explanation, as in earlier productions. This
methodology and the new narrativity of series are what make for their moral
relevance. However, this leads to revising the status of morality – to seeing
it not in rules and principles of decision-making, but rather in attention to
ordinary behavior, everyday microchoices, individuals’ styles of expressing
themselves and making claims. Perhaps, the material of television series
allows for even greater contextualization, historicity (regularity, duration),
familiarization, and education of perception (attention to the expressions
and gestures of the characters, which the viewer learns to know and love
despite their flaws, attachment to recurring figures integrated into everyday
life, the presence of faces and words on the “small screen”).
Morality is constituted by the claims of individuals, and the recognition
of others’ claims; the recognition of a plurality of moral positions and voices
within the same small world – hence, the polyphonic nature of television
series, the plurality of singular expressions, the staging of arguments and
debates, and the moral atmosphere that emanates from them.
Breaking with traditional criticism, which made the intelligence and
meaning of films a by-product of critical interpretation, Cavell confirmed the
importance of the collective writing of films, and the function of screenwrit-
ers, directors, and actors in creating the meaning and educational value
of f ilms. It is therefore necessary to show, within the moral expression
constituted by television series, the moral choices – both individual and
collective – negotiations, conflicts, and agreements that are at the basis
of morality: the choices and itineraries of fictional characters, plot twists,
conflicts, reconciliations, slips of the tongue, and repressions.
For many of us, one of the most painful personal events of recent years
was the unexpected and cruel death of Eddard Stark (Sean Bean) towards
the end of the first season of Game of Thrones. How many upset and
indignant SMS messages were exchanged, across all generations, during
146 Stories

Episode 9 of Season 3, at the traumatic moment of the massacre of the rest

(not quite all) of the Stark family? This wide sharing of moral emotions, the
ability to arouse and release them, is one of the originalities of this series,
unlike any other, which reworked our experience.
GoT changed our vocabulary and grammar, making “Khaleesi” a common
name and “Hodor” an ordinary phrase. When looking around or observing
themselves, everyone could see the mode of consumption of this series. At a
time when we could imagine that the series would definitely be consumed
in large doses, in box-sets of whole seasons, or in marathons of one or two
days, GoT renewed its fan base. During the ten weeks during which it invades
their lives, with the weekly rhythm of the soap opera, the imagination is set
in motion with the anxious expectation of the sequel. As it is this rhythm
that is the strength of the series, its inscription in the life of the spectators
of both sexes, and in a human lifetime of days and weeks, in the sense of
expectation that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted is a basic
element of our life form. For the usually voracious consumer of series, this
new way of inhabiting time is strangely responsive to the temporal extension
of the seasons in the series: Winter is coming. At the beginning of the first
season, we emerge from a ten-year summer; we wait for winter; and, in the
world of GoT, winters can last ten years, or even a lifetime. This temporality,
at once strange, displaced, and yet so close to us, gives GoT its atmosphere
and distinctive texture.
Game of Thrones expanded the very concept of the “TV series.” It is
a series that belongs to fans, and is the most downloaded and cited of all.
It revived the traditional mode of consumption of the genre when it was
assumed that series would be consumed as box-sets or binge-watching.
GoT swamps its viewers during the ten weeks in which it invades their
lives. With the weekly rhythm of the serial, the imagination is set in
motion, by that anxious, curious waiting for what comes next. It is its
vital rhythm that is the strength of the series. Its mode of inhabiting time
responds strangely to its rescaling of the seasons: Winter is coming. This
temporal texture is coupled with another modality of waiting: from the
first episode, the viewer is caught, enlisted in this world where anything
can happen. The end of the pilot showed us the young Bran Stark, who
had been followed with increasing interest from the outset, climbing a
tower and surprising Cersei and Jaime Lannister, who throws him out of
the window. From this foundational moment, GoT engages with many
taboos – incest, the invulnerability of heroes, and the protection of children
– that structure the hierarchies of human life. From this point onward,
everything is possible.
Spoilers, Twists, and Dr agons 147

In addition, what is worse is our surprise at enjoying the dalliance of

Kingslayer in Series 3 with Brienne (Gwendoline Christie). The appearance
of this character, a giantess with proportions more suited to the large than
the small screen, is a surprise. As for Ned Stark, his character surprisingly
continues to hover over the entire series so far: despite the fact that he had
a hard time politically, according to Machiavellian analysis, he represents
a moral figure who impresses us, as in any real encounter. GoT surprises
us, but this is because we surprise ourselves, male and female spectators
alike, with our reactions.
In addition, there is the diversification of characters and the subversion of
dualisms (able−disabled, man−woman, old−young, even human−nonhuman,
living−nonliving). The heroism of Arya Stark, Daenerys Targaryen, and Tyrion
Lannister – with Peter Dinklage’s “premiere” topping the credits – makes
GoT a radically democratic series: dwarfs (Tyrion), fat slobs (Samwell), the
physically and mentally handicapped (Bran, Hodor), prostitutes (Shae),
savages (Ygritte, Osha), hideous monsters (Clegane, etc.), all exist on the same
level as more presentable heroes. GoT is also a feminist series, despite criti-
cisms provoked by its scenes of sexual abuse, because it integrates feminist
demands, creating unforgettable female role models in a world still obviously
dominated by men. It is also this political dynamism (which liberates or
reveals the ordinary heroism and power of action by women, the disabled,
slaves and populations from the South), which is the democratic power of GoT.
“It’s not Porn, it’s HBO” is the title of a short YouTube video that points
to the hallmark of HBO, from Sex and the City to Girls. GoT is also
gloriously at the root of the neologism sexposition (meaning sex scenes
used in the main narration). Against a background of domination, superb
women characters emerge: Catelyn Stark, Brienne, Arya, and Yara. All of
these illustrate the ability of such series to invent a feminine heroism,
which is sometimes modest, as in Girls, where Lena Dunham created a
new distorted portrayal of the brevity of being a girl. GoT and Girls are
more in line with the cult series of the 2000s, such as Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, than with HBO classics.
In this way, GoT approaches the ideal popular culture since the beginning
of Hollywood cinema as evoked by Stanley Cavell – a culture capable of being
appropriated by all, thanks to an education which teaches us that heroism
is within the reach of everyone. GoT releases or reveals women’s capacity
for action, for the populations of the South and slaves, as liberated by the
Khaleesi … democracy is coming. There remains the essential anxiety: what
will be left to tell when the series has (a long way to go) caught up with the
novels of George R.R. Martin? Winter is coming …
148 Stories

II

It was a long time ago that Montaigne said one should not judge before the end:
“In judging the life of others, I always look at how the end has gone” (Essays,
Book I, chap. 18). It has also been a long time since one would not have been
allowed to evaluate a work – either a film, book or, in this case, a series – before
having seen it to the end (or, at least one season). But from the first episodes
of the second season of True Detective (2015), fans and critics went wild,
expressing their disappointment as though it were a personal insult.
This series, which was hugely popular from 2014 onward – mainly for its
Bayou atmosphere and Matthew McConaughey’s accent – has now sparked
harsh criticism, particularly as a result of the conformity of its view of Los
Angeles, with Mafia characters and over-the-top losers, plot confusion, and
so on. Yet the second season offers revelations, including the impressive
performance of Vince Vaughn, an underrated actor of genius. The Los Angeles
of True Detective baffles because it is a cocktail of contemporary culture,
from Swingers (1996) to 24 (2001-2010) and L.A. Confidential (1997). There
are also beautiful and unusual female characters (including the policewoman
played by Rachel McAdams), unlike the first season, where women were merely
functional in a male story. It is these women who close the story and give it
meaning in the final moment where, fleeing yet still fighting, they express the
very resistance of life. The heroes are endearing in their imperfection, which
leads to the self-destruction of men. Spoiler alert! After premature judgment,
the terror of the spoiler is the second plague of seriphilia – if we can still describe
seriphiliacs as spectators who find their enjoyment in suspense above all else.
What about the pleasure of rewatching a movie, such as Gone Girl (2014) or
The Sixth Sense (1999)? I am not speaking about Titanic (1997) or Lincoln
(2012), whose outcome is known, without, I think, diminishing their intensity.
Yet the absolute crime today seems to be to give the public some clue
about coming events in a series. Game of Thrones is the one for which the
pressure is the greatest, so much so that “spoilerphobia” occupies the bulk
of critical energies. And yet, the spoiler is already there; no, don’t tell me
whether my darling Jon Snow will die! But it’s already in George Martin’s
book, as every reader knows. Such an obsession, again, even if it extends
to films, devalues ​​the series as genuine works and compromises serious
criticism. But do not despise the series’ audience, I am told, for there is no
misplaced elitism. The TV series empowers the audience, who is able, by
virtue of its experience and preferences, to judge for itself. The populism
of series also entails perfectionism, demanding that everyone go beyond
their conformities rather than being satisfied with their own impressions.
Spoilers, Twists, and Dr agons 149

David Simon, the author of the cult series The Wire, is not bothered
by spoilers: the title of his latest work, Show Me a Hero (a 2015 series of 6
episodes for HBO) is a spoiler in itself. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage, referred to
in the title (“Show me a hero and I’ll write you tragedy”), tells us in advance
the end of the story. Like Wikipedia, Show Me tells the true story of Nick
Wasicsko, the young mayor of Yonkers (a city of 200,000 inhabitants in New
York State) who found himself engaged in a fight for racial desegregation
in the decade 1980-1990, by enacting a law inspired by the planner, Oscar
Newman, which dictated the construction of social housing in otherwise
white districts. Here, the spoiler is a reality.
Given that this is Simon, the show is far from a biopic. In a style that is
even more documentary in nature than The Wire, it presents a democratic
galaxy of characters as striking as Nick (brilliant Oscar Isaac, the star who
manages to stay on the same level as the others). The lesson of this series
lies in its democratic aesthetic, without any moralizing: every point of view
is expressed and heard. Democracy is presented, not as speech (hollow
and hypocritical) or as a political system (totally corrupt), but as a form
of life and social transformation; in the fate of the poorly housed (women)
who will slowly benefit from desegregation and leave the housing projects
(Carmen, an immigrant Dominican worker, mother of three children; Norma,
a medical assistant who loses her sight; Doreen, initially clueless, who
then emerges magnificently) and that of the white citizens who, like Mary
(Catherine Keener), evolve from visceral and violent opposition to the arrival
of foreigners to acceptance and support, out of shame for the repugnant
racist behavior of their dear white neighbors.
The lesson of this experience of the last century is obviously topical. Out
of tragedy – the political and personal disaster of Nick Wasicsko’s trajectory
– come democratic and ordinary success, however fleeting and limited it
may be, for democracy is not a political game, whether tragic or ridiculous,
nor is it a matter of great moralistic principles. It is the micro change of
humans, slow and imperceptible and yet so visible on the screen. It involves
their sense of responsibility toward strangers. What we call democratic
“populism” today only makes sense (spoiler alert!) if it is anchored in the
possibility of self-transformation.

III

Yes, Jon Snow is still dead. He even spent the entire first episode of the
season frozen on his table, while the other characters, Sansa, Theon, Arya,
150 Stories

Fig. 9.1: Concern about whether the Game of Thrones character Jon Snow was really dead became an
issue of global concern.

and Tyrion each made their mark (on us too) on the ever larger territory
encompassed by the credits of Game of Thrones.
There is no longer the annual rite of GoT’s return for a new season – in this
case, Season 6, which will, of course, be the best of all, say the show runners,
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, in the spirit of overbidding that characterizes
the latest developments of the series. There is also the annual rite of waiting
for the new season of GoT, with its procession of hypotheses, teasers, recaps,
redundant commentaries, and delirium over spoilers. The rhythm of GoT,
whose narration is explicitly built around a structure of waiting (Winter is
coming) is now inscribed in our lives, this time creating the expectation of
a possible resurrection of the hero massacred in the last episode of Season 5.
We are aware that in GoT anything can happen, as seen in such traumatic
scenes as Episode 9 which includes the sudden beheading of Ned Stark,
who had seemed to be the main hero in the first season, and the carnage
of the wedding in the third season. It is this permanent threat to their lives,
apart from the richness of the writing and performances, which creates our
attachment to GoT’s characters. This feature is shared with another popular
series, The Walking Dead (2010- ), which has just completed its sixth
season with similar suspense: who was actually crushed in the last scene?
The potential loss and constant vulnerability of their heroes (which also
structured its precursor, 24) builds a special relationship with the public,
especially in a century replete with threats to human life.
Each in a kind of excess and adapted from other works, GoT and TWD
have, in fact, rehabilitated two of popular culture’s most underrated genres,
Spoilers, Twists, and Dr agons 151

namely fantasy and the zombie movie, giving them an epic dimension as
well as a particular realism, built on our attachment to characters who are
imperfect yet striking, and who become part of our own stories. So much
so that their loss, possible or realized, becomes personal, yet mourning
is impossible because they are still there, even if they are dead – and not
just because they are fictional characters! Ned and Jon Snow, like Shane,
Beth, or Tyreese, are still alive, even when dead, and this makes their loss
irremediable and melancholy. They are the walking dead.
No one outside the show knows about Jon Snow, except President Obama
who negotiated advance viewing of the precious episodes. The 5th season
(which was not completely successful) was a turning point in this respect as
until then there were at least two GoT audiences: those who had read George
R.R. Martin’s five volumes and were more or less forewarned, and those who
discovered the story on TV and were regularly in shock (“Aargh!,” “No!”).
The democratic nature of GoT puts an end to this ultimate segregation. The
series is no longer an adaptation, having caught up with Martin. In going live,
“off the page” it has become independent of the written saga, perhaps losing
in narrative as it takes off, while developing its hold as a pure TV series. As
Andy Greenwald stated on ESPN’s blog Grantland, it is possible that “what
we took for an exercise in adapting a book for television has led to making
a book from television.” Furthermore, there is the question about how to
continue writing novels, with a new threat constantly looming, despite the
protests of the followers: the series might spoil the books.
The tyranny of the spoiler (“spoilerophobia” which is nothing but the
obsessive quest for spoilers) is certainly the dark side of the GoT phenomenon.
Certainly GoT infantilizes, achieving the paradoxical feat of taking us back
to childhood by means of a very adult TV series. The terror of the spoiler,
however, blocks reflexivity and introduces unbearable constraints into an
area that has liberated its audience. How is knowing what will happen (and
which is known anyway) a problem? What conception of vision and criticism
justifies such a normative delirium? One would come to appreciate the rude
behavior of the actor, Ian McShane, a magnificent Swearengen in the cult
series Deadwood (2004-2006), scheduled to appear in Season 6 of GoT, who
spoiled a character’s return from the dead, responding to the indignation of
GoT fans on the Net with “get a life,” adding, crassly, “It’s just tits and dragons.”
Neither breasts nor dragons, however, are what captivated audiences in
the first episode of Series 6. Rather, it is the pure pleasure of finding Brienne
and hearing her once again pledge allegiance to a woman: Stark. The strength
of GoT, beyond its ability to make everything fit onto a small screen, lies in
the moral aspiration and life force that carries it in such moments, and in the
152 Stories

ability to gradually bring together the characters spread over its territory. It
is women, at least as much as men, who represent this form of perfectionist
aristocracy: Catelyn, Brienne, Arya, Yara, and, of course, the Khaleesi, are
the true moral successors of Ned, holding high the values ​​of an imperfect
world. Yet bravery and perseverance are not everything. Moral resources
are also found among the humble, the vulnerable, and children – Samwell,
the coward (a role comparable to that of Hugo in Lost, 2004-2010); Bran, the
cripple; and Shae, the maid. These characters create new and unprecedented
formulas with regard to heroism. Given the fact that GoT is more realistic in
doing so than historical series, it finds its realism in proximity to humans,
its emotional strength in humanity, and the modest heroism of characters
doomed to death (“Valar morghulis,” S2, E101), but who in the meantime, as
the late Ygrette told Jon Snow, must live.
Meanwhile, Jon Snow lies on his table. Do something!

Adapted from newspaper columns originally published in Libération, 2014-2016.

Translated by Ian Christie.

Notes

1. “Valar morghulis” apparently means “all men must die” in High Valyrian.
“Jaqen H’ghar teaches it to Arya Stark when he departs. Although he does
not explain its meaning to her (nor does anybody else), she begins to use
the words in her prayer of people she wants dead” (“Valar morghulis,” A Wiki
of Fire and Ice, last modified February 23, 2018, http://awoiaf.westeros.org/
index.php/Valar_morghulis).

References and Further Reading

Cavell, Stanley. 1979a. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—. 1979b. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
—. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
—. 1997. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
—. 2004. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of Moral Life. Cambridge: Belknap,
Harvard University Press.
PART III
Discussions
10. Storytelling and Mainstream
Television Today – A Dialogue
John Ellis and Annie van den Oever

Watching Television as a “Working Through” of Everyday

Concerns

Annie van den Oever: In several publications since the 1970s, amongst them
your Visible Fictions, you have described watching mainstream television as
a working through in the sense of psychoanalysis (Ellis 1982). I would like to
discuss with you some new questions regarding storytelling and television,
as its ongoing practice allows us to work through the themes which somehow
bother us today. Mundane, mainstream television, you have argued, offers
viewers an opportunity to deal with the themes that bother them, and part
of the working through is to return to these over and over again. In other
words, mainstream television need not be “good” by any classical standard
and watching it is not necessarily fun. I recall that significant moment
during the London Hands-On History Conference in February 2016, when
the American cultural critic, Susan J. Douglas, said that though she studies
contemporary American television; she absolutely does not like watching it;
to which you replied, “That’s the point!” Could you explain why “not liking
television” is the point? What would you say are mainstream television’s
most striking elements not to like?
John Ellis: In my comment to Susan Douglas, I meant that an academic
studying television might well not enjoy the programs they are studying. Why
should a cultural critic have the right to study exclusively what they like?
The point is that those programs are fun for the people who use them on an
everyday basis, and this enjoyment is a social phenomenon that any academic
who is seriously interested in the area of television (or any other popular
medium) may well not share, but should certainly be studying. However, even
if you do share the popular enjoyment, studying things sometimes “breaks”
them. The “fun” evaporates once it is interrogated; the magic disappears once
the mechanism of the trick is revealed. This is particularly the case with
popular television forms such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-style
game shows, celebrity-based chat shows, X-Factor-style talent competi-
tions and other format-based entertainment, from Big Brother to The
Great British Bake off. They often belong to the ephemeral historical
156 Stories

moment of their production and consumption, and the reconstruction of

the ephemeral conjuncture can be both prolix and painstaking. You have to
understand how the particular stories of the participants fitted into a broader
historical moment. Yet such a reconstruction is key to understanding how
and why popular television forms actually work so well when experienced
spontaneously and “in the moment.” These forms depend on a “currency,”
and belong within a specific historical moment. This currency underpins
the distinctive appeal of live or “near-live” television.
AvdO: However, “working through” also suggests that there is more to it
than mere “fun”?
JE: The term “working through” tries to capture the social or psychological
importance of these popular forms. They are able to use humor to channel
anxiety and to offer (for example, in soap operas and novelas) narratives
of success and failure lived by people who are very familiar to their regular
viewers. Similarly, other popular forms can offer the entertainment of
ordinary people, or (increasingly) celebrities, doing something “outside
their zone,” dealing with everyday anxieties and problems.
A show like Strictly Come Dancing / Dancing with the Stars (broad-
cast since 2004) offers narratives about people learning new skills, learning
to adapt to a new way of using their bodies. They have varied responses to
this challenge, and their weekly progress is monitored intensively. They
are shown training, experiencing problems, or even accidents, and then
participating in a weekly competition which culminates in the classic
climax of one “celebrity” and his or her partner “winning.” Each week the
candidates have to display and discuss their progress or lack thereof. They
are no different from school kids in our increasingly test-and-result-oriented
education system. More generally, their acquisition of dancing skills is
a metaphor for one of the major concerns of modern life, the need of all
citizens to adapt constantly to new circumstances: new forms of work, new
and unfamiliar people, and hostile and challenging surroundings.
AvdO: You just said that, increasingly, celebrities are doing something
“outside their zone,” helping viewers deal with everyday anxieties and
problems.
JE: The current development of shows, such as I’m a Celebrity, Get Me
Out of Here to the celebrity versions of shows, such as Masterchef or
Family Feud are a means of pitching celebrities into situations that are
uncomfortable for them. This provides a way of working through, in an
entertainment envelope, one of the more fundamental problems of modern
existence: the unsettled and unsettling nature of the modern economy as
it undergoes a series of technological changes, global power shifts, and a
Story telling and Mainstream Television Today – A Dialogue 157

long depression unlike any in modern times. Celebrities are taken out of
their comfort zones, just as we ordinary citizens are. Their reactions are no
different from ours and those of people around us. So this “working through”
is both instructive and cathartic.
AvdO: Is national television the best place for dealing with such national
and global problems?
JE: National television still has a most extraordinary reach and penetration
into national cultures, despite all the changes wrought by new forms of
delivery of television-like material. National broadcasters still matter. They
may be losing audience share, but their share continues to be large and,
more importantly, continues to consolidate different demographic groups
into a single experience in a way that no other form of television is capable
of doing. So it may not be the “best place,” but it certainly is the prime place!
The concept of “working through” as I presented it in Seeing Things ad-
dresses the social and everyday nature of linear broadcast television, which
is normally constructed around the world on a national basis. The concept
seeks to explore the repetitive nature of much “ordinary TV” (as Francis
Bonner put it in her excellent 2003 book Ordinary Television) by looking
for the basis of its strength and continuing appeal. Repetition is key to TV
forms in a way that is not as pronounced as other forms of storytelling in
other media: the characters, settings, and scenarios are familiar, so that it
is possible to concentrate on what is unfamiliar in a nonthreatening way.
The disturbance or problem comes in familiar wrappers, so it is as though
there is already a level of acceptance or acclimatization within the fictional
universe (or the entertainment format universe). A new film or TV series
requires an effort in order to acclimatize: the viewer has to get to know
the characters and the rules of the diegetic world. When a “difficult social
issue” is dealt with in a social problem fiction, it comes on top of all of the
need to get to know and understand the characters and context. As a result,
perhaps, the difficulty of the issue is emphasized by the unfamiliar context.
In contrast, the soap opera or familiar format has no such problems of viewer
acclimatization. There is less unfamiliar complexity at the character level
(they are familiar to regular viewers), so there can be more complexity at
the level of the social issues and the dilemmas that they pose.
Soap operas are a safe area in which the unsafe or the unfamiliar can
be explored. Indeed, all stories are safe areas of risk where we can see and
experience events that would be intolerable in real life. In fictional stories,
there’s no problem with murder, extreme jeopardy, etc. In fact there is
considerable pleasure in being able to play, in a narrative context, with such
taboos and terrors. Different genres of storytelling balance the elements of
158 Stories

safety and risk in their own particular ways. Physical jeopardy, for instance,
can be much greater in horror or crime genres, but these genres find it
difficult to integrate the emotional anxieties which are usually stirred up
in melodramas and soap operas.
AvdO: You just argued that historical and contextual reconstruction are key
to understanding how and why popular television forms actually work so
well when experienced spontaneously and “in the moment.” Can you give
an example of such reconstruction?
JE: I undertook a reconstruction of this kind when writing about the crisis
of trust in the documentary genre which occurred around the turn of the
century. This was published as “Documentary and Truth on Television” in
2005. This required trying to find the popular discussions that took place in
this presocial media era about “Did you really believe that show last night?”
I tried to find evidence from the talk of radio DJs, but that isn’t archived;
I looked for the interviews conducted by various researchers at the time,
but they weren’t archived (scandalously); so, in the end, I returned to the
familiar sources of newspapers and TV itself. But the excavation of that
moment seems to succeed well enough to be able to explain a verifiable shift
in terms of the way in which documentaries were made and how they tried
to address the concerns of their viewers through increased self-reflexivity.
AvdO: Would you perhaps say that some parts of your ADAPT project,
though not aiming at audience research but at the reconstruction of the
BBC’s production circumstances in the earlier days, may be valuable for
such reconstructions in the future?
JE: The practices of “hands-on history” show that having the concrete objects
and circumstances of production produces very different memories in
the participants, and enables them to demonstrate aspects of what they
did in a way that: (a) they would not normally articulate; and (b) brings
forward the group dynamics with regard to work. In terms of applying this
hands-on approach to what people did when they watched TV (rather than
its industrialized production), the work of Helen Wheatley, Rachel Moseley,
and Helen Wood (2012) seems to have gone in the same direction, especially
their Pop-Up TV shop.

Television Is the New Cinema

AvdO: Some television scholars have claimed that so-called quality television
from the heyday of HBO onward added considerably to the mainstream
storytelling practices in television, adding complexity in terms of characters
Story telling and Mainstream Television Today – A Dialogue 159

and narrators, plot lines, story twists, multilayered narrative structures, and
the like. As a result, viewing practices changed, as did the audiences that
television was able to attract after the 1990s, as Jason Mittell has argued
in his essay on “narrative complexity” (Mittell 2006). The changes on the
production side and in the television series themselves, as well as the audi-
ence responses he observed, were not strictly an American phenomenon.
As to the audience: HBO series have been watched worldwide and viewers
have responded to them, often on fan pages. Would you say that these
changes in storytelling and viewing practices have affected mainstream
television’s audiences in some way? If so, are there indications that this
affected the ways in which viewers watch mainstream television today?
Have they perhaps “gone meta”?
JE: The development of multistranded narration dates back to Hill Street
Blues (1981-1987), which is discussed in Todd Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time ([1983]
2000) and the subsequent work of Stephen Bochco, David E. Kelley and
others (e.g., NYPD Blue, 1993-2005). This was broadcast TV’s first moment
of responding to the growth of new forms of suppliers: the beginning of
the age of availability as I put it (in Seeing Things). Others (e.g., Henderson
2007) have identified this tendency as a “soapisation” of television drama,
with the development not only of multiple plots and general sophistication
but also story strands hanging over from episode to episode, sometimes
disappearing and reappearing some time later, as I demonstrated in a short
essay on NYPD Blue (Ellis 2007). This was a development of television
narration that exploited the regular episode pattern and was intended, from
a business perspective, to develop customer loyalty. Creatively, it allowed
greater character and storytelling sophistication in a way that fitted with
the increasingly fragmented patterns of US network broadcasting.
It is interesting that HBO borrowed this newly developed form and contin-
ued using it, despite its lack of commercial breaks. Even more interesting was
that subsequent nonlinear on-demand enterprises like Netflix have made
this kind of narrative TV the cornerstone of their bid for world domination. It
is a more industrial form of television production requiring teams of writers,
as the Danish experiment with writers’ rooms has also proved (Redvall 2013).
This development has provided problems for some TV cultures more used
to the cult of the individual writer, as in the UK. It is impossible to think
of Dennis Potter in a writers’ room, of course; but a younger writer such as
Paul Abbott (Shameless, State of Play, No Offence) has experimented
with team writing to develop and extend his initial series formats.
Generally, multistranded drama is a form of confident and expansive
narration that has become relatively general for high-end television fiction.
160 Stories

This creates a class of fiction that is quite distinct from the form of the
classical feature film, and has more in common with the three-decker novels
of the nineteenth century (many of which, not uncoincidentally, were also
first issued in weekly episodes). The multistranded narrative allows for
many more incidental and seemingly accidental “in between” moments
of a narrative, allowing writers to explore more of the implications and
by-ways of the scenario than would be possible within a tighter feature-film
format. I would say the multistranded narrative offers a very different kind
of complexity from that of the puzzle film or the “complex” film. You could
say that it exhausts more of the possibilities of the characters, situations,
and themes. That it incorporates more of the feel of how everyday events
take place, in a rather meandering way, always already embedded in a
much larger set of happenings and concerns that the characters actually
share, with events repercussing on one another. This is conveyed in a TV
drama such as Happy Valley (2014- ), where an awful lot goes on that is
not really relevant to the plot, but which is crucial to the state of mind of
the main characters, and therefore how they deal with the events thrown
at them by the main plot.

The “Less Waste” Storytelling Model

AvdO: Many nineteenth-century novels were first published in the news-

papers, piece by piece, as serials or feuilletons as they were called in the
French newspapers, although this term has acquired different meanings in
other cultures. In his 2006 book The Way Hollywood Tells It, David Bordwell
argued that a wave of complex narratives emerged after the major popular
success of Pulp Fiction in 1994, although he also noted that twice before,
Hollywood had seen such a wave: between 1940 and 1955; and from the
mid-1960s till the early 1970s. The third wave, from 1994 onward, Bordwell
attributes to product differentiation between independent filmmakers. In
her 2006 introduction to a special double issue of Film Criticsm on Complex
Narration, Janet Staiger (2006) argued along similar lines: that among the
“torrent” of complex narratives, product differentiation was important,
especially facing the competition from quality television series, but also
given the “manipulability” of a film’s linear flow through DVDs’ random
access, which was also discussed by Laura Mulvey in her chapter on the
“possessive viewer” in Death 24x a Second (2006). You have discussed the
differences between cinema and television on a number of occasions, for
instance in “Cinema and Television: Laios and Oedipus” (Ellis 1998). How
Story telling and Mainstream Television Today – A Dialogue 161

do you view the development of complexity within the context of quality

television?
JE: Quality TV has a lot to do with the narrative complexity and character
development (particularly of secondary characters) that serial space allows.
But it is also a matter of the level of investment in production values … in
the creation of a complex and believable diegetic world that is inhabited by
these characters. This costs money. And, as John Caldwell has pointed out in
Televisuality (1995), high-end fiction in the US comes with the development of
distinctive “looks” for the big drama series of the 1990s. This was a time when
linear TV could command huge financial resources because of its concentration
within a relatively small number of suppliers: the main television networks.
Things have changed economically since then, with many more ways
of accessing and financing television but, once again, we are experiencing
(and some say more than ever) a boom in TV drama/fiction series produc-
tion. There are several factors contributing to this. One is the continuing
storytelling crisis in the Hollywood fiction film, where big-budget cinema
has seen little or nothing new for the best part of two decades, and middle-
range narrative films have become increasingly difficult to finance and
get made. “Television is the new cinema” is a regular refrain from a certain
type of director and writer (such as Mike Figgis in Britain) and was even
the subject of a New Yorker debate in 2012 (Remnick et al. 2012). Television
fiction is also the new cinema because it is in some instances commanding
feature film budgets. This was the infamous claim made for the Netflix
series The Crown (2016- ). It offers good creative economy: why waste good
characters and scenarios on one self-contained text, when you can stretch
them over eight or even eighty episodes? Why waste money on promoting
a new concept when the old one still works? In this sense, The Crown has
even more finance than a medium budget feature film, because all the money
shows on the screen, rather than the huge share of a feature film budget
that goes toward marketing. Even Hollywood has tried to emulate this new
“less waste” storytelling model by making its series of superhero movies.
But the longest series of feature films so far is the Bond series, weighing in
at a current 26 movies since 1962 – about the same as the average season
of NYPD Blue or Grey’s Anatomy (2005- ).
In television, the current fiction boom is also fuelled by new entrants into
the market, some of which, like Netflix, aim to be global disruptors. Netflix
is in many ways the Uber of television. That’s a different argument, but the
aggressive presence of Netflix, Amazon, and the others, accessing different
forms of finance than traditional TV, has increased the sheer amount of
quality drama being produced at the moment.
162 Stories

AvdO: What changes in the forms or genres of stories currently being told
on TV do you observe, if indeed any?
JE: The main change is that television drama storytelling tends to be made for
a longer period of active consumption than previously. It has less “currency.”
Some of the role of what was once “for the moment” TV drama has now been
taken by narratively driven reality and challenge shows. Drama is pretty
explicitly constructed now for “boxset” viewing, for binge-watching, or
watching in the user’s own time and convenience.

Television Viewing Is the New Cinema Viewing

AvdO: In “Cinema and Television: Laios and Oedipus,” you argued that
“[t]elevision narration learned more from Joseph von Sternberg than it
did from Howard Hawks or John Ford. Television narration has a certain
fetishism about it: it is condemned to repeat rather than to move forward”
(Ellis 1998, 131-132). Do you still take this view?
JE: This is a complex and shifting situation, where it is dangerous to make
huge generalizations in the way that I did in Visible Fictions back in 1982.
The increase in television production values has had a pronounced effect,
combined with the greater control that users now have over how they
consume television. Even in 1982, when I tried to distinguish between
the different visual regimes of television and cinema using the idea of
glance versus gaze, I was careful to say that television could well support
(and did support) much more sustained forms of concentrated “gazing”
just like cinema. Huge screens, high definition, and personal control over
scheduling have all brought us to a situation where “television viewing
is the new cinema viewing” – but then cinema viewing has also changed
greatly over this period.
There have been other developments too which have complexified how
television tells its stories. The key TV form of the situation comedy has also
changed in a narration-driven direction. Sitcom has long been the least
“current” of TV genres: it is the one genre where repeats (a much-hated
practice in the days of linear TV) were always tolerated, and often even
welcomed. Now sitcoms, under the influence of US sitcoms, have begun
to incorporate narrative developments and substantial changes in the
scenario and the places of characters. Take the US sitcom Modern Family
(2009 to present, 9 seasons so far) as an example. The child actors grow up;
their characters change; they pass through the education system, etc. Their
anchoring character flaws remain, still motivating the comedic scenarios and
Story telling and Mainstream Television Today – A Dialogue 163

providing the eternal conflicts. But this is sitcom where time elapses over a
series, and characters live with the consequences of their previous actions
in a way that was not the case for earlier iterations of the sitcom genre.
AvdO: Would you say that there is a difference in terms of the themes
surfacing for a “working through” in complex television and mainstream
television today?
JE: As is clear, I don’t make a distinction between complex and mainstream
television. The mainstream is very often more complex than it first appears.
AvdO: Concerning the practices of viewing television today: how important
are recent changes in TV as an apparatus or a setup (or the dispositif as
theorized in film studies) for watching TV in the home situation? Do you
think there have been significant changes in home viewing practices created
by new technologies such as large screen, HDTV, and so on?
JE: The main change on the production side is the breaking of the single
mechanism of linear TV as the sole form of delivery. Linear TV still remains
dominant in most markets, and the single most important source of TV
program production. But there are disruptive challengers at work even in
that area.
In addition to linear TV, we have user-driven online TV provision, some
of it provided by the traditional suppliers of linear TV, “the broadcasters.”
They allow users to access a defined amount of material by streaming for
a defined amount of time. There is very little on offer that is the equivalent
of the DVD, something that you can download for good. So the mechanism
is still a temporary one … you get the stuff when they allow you to have
it. It is still essentially the same mechanism as linear broadcast TV: the
offer is “you can have it when we say you can have it.” The only difference
is that the time of availability is stretched out for a few weeks or months.
Programs still disappear, or are unavailable, as anyone who teaches TV well
knows, and consumers are increasingly beginning to find out. It’s all right
if you belong to the generations for whom Friends (1994-2004) is a comfort
blanket, but pretty much anything else disappears after most of its market
value has been nearly exhausted.
In terms of the setup that users may choose today, streaming or time-
limited downloading allows people to watch TV material on any available
screen (smartphone, tablet, PC), and anywhere where there is an electricity
supply to top up batteries (on public transport, in the bath, on the beach, at
work, while watching linear TV, while on Facebook, etc.). The phenomena of
split and dispersed attention that I tried to capture with the ideas of “glance”
and “gaze” in Seeing Things still seem to apply in this new situation. In fact,
the new forms enable dispersed attention even more. And so we continue to
164 Stories

see forms of TV which build into themselves the expectation of dispersed

attention watching. The regular recapitulations of most reality shows are a
good example of this. Constructed initially to deal with frequent commercial
breaks, they have proved ideal for coping with the dispersed and interrupted
attention that is equally an aspect of the new “view anywhere” culture.
The real problem in this new dispositif is that of choice (from the viewer’s
perspective) and the management of consumer choice (from the supply
side). Linear TV schedules are a very good way of managing supply and
demand: they offer a relatively manageable supply of new material, which
will instantly gain a certain cultural currency. You “hear about” new TV, and
people are talking about new TV, both in other media outlets and socially.
But when it comes to choosing something in the new dispositif or mechanism
of nonlinear supply, the choice is both daunting and disappointing. The
interfaces offer brief descriptions that all sound the same, because they
leave out the accidentals and the incidentals that provide much of the
pleasure of fiction. They arrange into genres which are very generic. They
attempt to learn who you are, and tailor their offer to you, without seeming
to understand that entertainment is as much about escaping who you are
and what you have done, rather than about confirming those aspects of
the self. And finally, there is just too much stuff to handle. This is also the
reason why so much is taken away from consumers after a while. In theory,
digital television archives can allow endless backlists, but in practice this
is not the case. The abundance cannot be handled by consumers because
it would be a chaotic abundance. Choice management (both for providers
and for users) is a new problem and it is proving extremely difficult to solve.
And to illustrate further just some of the many choices presented to the
consumer and some of the related problems looming for the broadcasters, the
new dispositif also brings new problems in terms of image size, shape, and
definition. Something made for HD widescreen viewing on a premium-price
TV will also be watched on a PC or a handheld device, and so has to be
decipherable and pleasurable on all these scales and shapes. Equally, within
the industry, the question of file formats is a major headache. There are over
a hundred delivery formats in current use across the world for different
outlets and platforms. Ensuring that quality (image and sound quality, that
is) is not overly compromised in format transfer is a continuing problem.
This kind of problem replicates the old one of broadcast TV: what you send
out is not necessarily what the audience will be seeing on their individual
TV or phone or tablet screens, all of which are set up differently (just as
individual analog TV all differed). In reality, the TV dispositif still remains
rather less clear and perfect than as it is often idealized by both industry
Story telling and Mainstream Television Today – A Dialogue 165

leaders and academics. It is a rather messy and compromised thing, and so,
from a technological point of view, most of what is made remains within the
“safe area” of what is guaranteed to work … just as it was in the analog era.

References and Further Reading

Bonner, Francis. 2003. Ordinary Television. London, California, and New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Bordwell, David. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley:
University of California.
Caldwell, John. 1995. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Elberse, Anita. 2013. Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment.
New York: Henry Holt & Company.
Ellis, John. 1982. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. New York: Routledge.
—. 1998. “Cinema and Television: Laios and Oedipus.” In Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?,
edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann, 127-136. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press.
—. 2000. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London and New York: B.Tauris.
—. 2005. “Documentary and Truth on Television: The Crisis of 1999.” In New Challenges in
Documentary, edited by J. Corner and A. Rosenthal, 342-360. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
—. 2007. TV FAQ: Uncommon Answers to Common Questions About TV. London: I.B. Tauris.
Gitlin, Todd. 2000 [1983]. Inside Prime Time: With a New Introduction. Berkeley, LA and London:
University of California.
Henderson, Lesley. 2007. Social Issues in Television Fiction. Edingburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Mittell, Jason. 2006. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet
Light Trap 58, no. 1 (Fall): 29-40.
Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion Books.
Redvall, E.N. 2013. “Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark.” Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Remnick, David, Richard Brody, David Denby, Emily Nussbaum, and Kelefa Sanneh. 2012. “The
Big Story: Is Television the New Cinema?” The New Yorker, January 12, 2012. https://www.
newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-big-story-is-television-the-new-cinema.
Staiger, Janet. 2006. “Complex Narratives: An Introduction.” Film Criticism 31, no. 1-2 (Fall/
Winter): 2-4.
Wheatley, Helen, Rachel Moseley, and Helen Wood. 2012. “The Pop Up TV Pop Shop.” Warwick:
Department of Film and Television Studies. Last Modified June 3, 2012. https://warwick.ac.uk/
fac/arts/film/research/pastprojects/history_of_television_for_women_in_britain/popupshop/.
11. The Single Shot, Narration, and
Creativity in the Space of Everyday
Communication
Roger Odin

One of the most surprising developments in the recent evolution of cinema

is the inscription of filmic language as an operator in the space of everyday
communication. The space of everyday communication refers to interac-
tions with communicative intent between ordinary people (including with
oneself) about the ordinary affairs of everyday life. What is of interest here
is when filmic language is used to communicate common interests, what
happens when nothing is happening or, according to Georges Perec, “what
happens every day, and comes around every day, the banal, the everyday,
the obvious, the ordinary, the ultra-ordinary, the underlying noise, the
habitual” (1975, 253).
It immediately becomes clear that in this field, the single shot is para-
mount. To say that in this context there is hardly time or opportunity to
edit seems inadequate as an explanation. It seems truer to recognize that
the situation puts me in a position where making anything other than a
single shot would seem inappropriate. In ordinary spaces, the simple idea of
cutting a shot to change the angle is problematic. It is a matter of positioning:
the person who is filming feels the obligation to take responsibility for the
spatial and temporal continuity of the event being showcased, since he or
she belongs to this space and is conscious of the fact that he or she belongs
to it. Here Bazin’s rule of “montage forbidden” finds its most appropriate
application: “when what is essential to an event depends on the simultaneous
presence of two or more aspects of the action, montage is forbidden” (1969,
127). This is exactly what happens in such cases. The person who is filming
forms part of the system of relations. Therefore, there is great temptation to
believe that we are seeing a return to the language of early cinema, a victory
of “monstration” over narration.1 It seems to me that this way of describing
the situation does not address what is really happening: in particular, it
neglects the fact that those who create such shots have integrated (at least
implicitly) the figures of filmic language, and the fact that cinema always
has to do with narrativity (though not necessarily with storytelling) (Odin
2000, chap. 2). Nowadays, we can no longer film naively.
168 Stories

Fig. 11.1: Visiting grandparents by Skype.

Consider the following example: the classic scene of grandchildren

visiting their grandmother. Using his smartphone, the grandson films the
welcoming at the door and the embraces between people, moving closer
to catch the words of welcome and polite greetings; then, without cutting,
he enters the house and tracks the visitors into the living room; and still
without cutting, he pans around the room before finishing with a close-up
of a black-and-white family photograph on the wall. What we have here is
clearly a mini-story and, more precisely, a sequence shot, complete with
internal montage and complex camera movements.
More examples follow below. A man films himself while walking in a
bumpy tracking shot. We experience the creative work of the cameraman
as we see the close-up of his face, his eyes narrowed as he concentrates on
the movements necessary to keep himself in the shot. At the same time,
we discover the space in which he is walking, that is, the vast commercial
centre of an Asian city. We cannot say this is a case of description; in fact,
the shot makes us participate in the man’s discovery of the space in which
he is walking: this is clearly a case of first-person narration. Then, a couple
is waltzing and filming themselves from above; the man holding the stick is
watching it, while the woman watches him. The effect produced makes us
lose our spatial bearings, and leads us to wonder: Will the man who is filming
end up looking at his partner (which is indeed what happens)? The question
The Single Shot 169

arises from a narrative reading of the shot by the spectator (who asks the
question). The main difference between a selfie still (monstrative) and a
video is that in the latter, a process of narrativization is often introduced.
In The Aesthetic Life, Laurent Jenny writes:

How often my eye is caught by the picturesque display of one of those New
York grocery shops run by Pakistanis that stay open day and night, offering
a heterogeneous panorama of goods, ranging from biros to bouquets of
flowers […] mechanically, I take out my mobile phone … and in order to
see more, I find myself using the digital zoom to compare the effects of
transparency between ice cubes and banana. Checking the result fills me
with amazement. The subject has become totally unrecognizable, having
turned into an undeniably cubist composition, from that marvelous period
between 1908-12 [sic], when Braque and Picasso were teetering on the
edge of abstraction. […] The whole gives the impression that forms and
colors have been crushed into a frame that contains them with difficulty
and from which they want to escape. (2013, 89-91)

Here we are definitely discussing a special form of monstration which aims

at the transformation of a trivial filmed object into an abstract artistic
production. The monstration is narrativized by the impetus of the subject
of enunciation (what Ricoeur [1984, 88-89] calls a “phrase of action”: the
formula is “X does A, with such an aim, in such and such circumstances,
etc.”). It is also important to note, however, that the pleasure of passing
into abstraction is henceforth shared by a large number of people. Feeling
somewhat disillusioned, Jenny notes that “What was once refined aesthetic
practice has become a kind of democratic habitus” (2013, 69).
Another remarkable form of recourse to the single shot in ordinary space is
provided by GIFS or Vines which create a “loop” effect.2 Here it may seem that
we have returned to the precinema era of the Zoetrope, the Praxinoscope, or
the Kinetoscope, as Lev Manovich has suggested (2001, 264-268). However,
the novelty is that everyone can produce these loops by using a simple
application. Transformation is very clearly at the heart of these productions.
It is not always narrative and can be confined to a repetitive movement (the
play of light on a woman’s face; a colored carousel rotating in the night like
a magic ring), but when it is, the effect is a triumph of surprise. The shift
between the action shown and the loop effect (a fall from a skateboard
which has been looped produces a guaranteed comic effect); the wait for a
transformation that never comes, as when a glass is constantly filled with
wine but the level never rises; or the deceptive wait, when a magician taps
170 Stories

his finger on the ace of hearts and we wait for the card to change but it turns
out to be the magician who has changed into a large black man while the
card stays the same. Of course, we find constructions such as these in early
cinema. However, at that time, they were discoveries. Today, making a GIF
or a Vine is one choice among many (as one might decide to create a haiku
in poetry). We are now dealing with a genre.
Finally, it must be acknowledged that many of these shots exist only
in the moment in which they are created: they are not recorded. Filmic
language may be involved, but this is direct or live communication, as in
some television programs. It might begin with a Skype call between a young
couple and grandparents who are abroad. After a moment, the young man’s
voice says, “I’m going to show you something,” and then, without any cut,
the mobile phone is turned toward a television screen in the living room,
on which appears a video showing a young child taking its first steps. The
voice of one of the grandparents is heard, asking, “Are those his first steps?”;
then the grandfather says that he is sorry that he cannot speak to Laleh,
who is not there. Following this, another young woman calls Laleh on
her mobile, and the grandparents are able to see her on the mobile of the
young woman who is in contact via Skype, and who films her husband’s
mobile … An Iranian student described this situation to me, which was a
common occurrence in her family. In this case, narration passes through
a combination of different devices; and it really seems to be a new way of
telling or showing. In addition, it is also found elsewhere, outside everyday
space, for instance in art installations, transmedia storytelling, and business
communications.
Such shots are a sign of real inventiveness. More generally, according to
D.W. Winnicott ([1970] 1986), they are a sign of our ability to “live creatively,”
retaining throughout our lives something which belongs to the earliest
experiences of childhood: the feeling of being able to create a world. Sub-
sequently, we could speak of transitional creativity.3 It is enough to look at
what people do to realize that there is a certain joy in the way the single
continuous shot engages with/captures everyday life.

Translated by Ian Christie

The Single Shot 171

Notes

1. On the difference between “monstration” – literally “showing” – and narra-

tion, see Gaudreault (1987). (translator’s note).
2. Vine was a short-form video hosting service which users could use to share
six-second-long looping video clips. The service was founded in June 2012,
and acquired by Twitter in the same year, just before its official launch. GIF,
or Graphics Interchange Format, is a bitmap image format introduced in
1987, especially suited to short animations.
3. In 1953, Winnicott introduced the term “transitional object” to describe
those blankets, soft toys, and bits of cloth to which young children fre-
quently develop intense, persistent attachments. He believed that such
attachments represent an essential phase of ego development leading to
the establishment of a sense of self. See Winnicott’s seminal work, Playing
and Reality (1971).

References and Further Reading

Bazin André. 1969. “Montage interdit.” In Qu’est-ce- que le cinéma? Ontologie et langage. Paris: Cerf.
Gaudreault, André. 1987. “Narration and Monstration in the Cinema.” Journal of Film and Video
39, no. 2 (Spring): 29-36.
Jenny, Laurent. 2013. La vie esthétique: Stases et flux. Lagrasse: Verdier.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Odin, Roger. 2000. De la fiction. Brussels: De Boeck.
Perec, Georges. 1975. “Approche de quoi.” In Le pourrissement des sociétés, edited by Paul Virilio,
251-255. Paris: Union générale d’éditions. https://remue.net/cont/perecinfraord.html.
Ricœur, Paul. 1984. Temps et récit, II. La configuration dans le récit de fiction. Paris: Seuil.
Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London and New York: Routledge.
—. 1986 [1970]. “Living Creatively.” In Home Is Where We Start From, edited by Claire Winnicott,
Ray Sheperd, and Madeleine Davis, 39-54. New York: W.W. Norton.
PART IV
Practicalities
12. Rewriting Proust
Working with Chantal Akerman on La captive
– A Dialogue

Eric de Kuyper and Annie van den Oever

On October 5, 2015, the widely renowned Belgian f ilmmaker, Chantal

Akerman, took her own life. Her untimely death prompted an outpouring
of sadness about the loss of an extraordinary filmmaker, who has been
celebrated ever since her masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du com-
merce, 1080 Bruxelles made her famous in 1975 at the age of 25.
The Belgian filmmaker, writer, and film scholar, Eric de Kuyper, who,
like Akerman, had been living and working in Brussels at the time, met her
for the first time in his capacity as film critic. As he recalled shortly after
her death, that was in 1968: Akerman brought him her first film, Saute
ma ville / Blow Up My Town (1968) after having been sent to see him by
the filmmaker, André Delvaux “for good reasons. At the time I had a film
program on Flemish Television (BRT), De andere film / The Other Movie.
I showed experimental films, underground movies, and other bizarre things.
I was impressed by the direct spontaneity of the film as well as by the maker.
So of course I showed the film [on Flemish Television]” (De Kuyper and Van
den Oever 2015). At the time, Akerman struck him as being a very young
girl, thinking that she was only 16 years old, although she was actually 18.
They not only became friends and remained so for most of her life, but they
also worked closely together on several projects, including La captive (2000).
De Kuyper made several films himself, including Naughty Boys (1984) and,
more recently, My Life as an Actor (2015). This dialogue reass­esses within
the personal context of their friendship, the writing projects they worked on
together. Proust played an important role in their joint reading and writing,
and this dialogue deals mainly with their joint work on Proust for La captive.

Annie van den Oever: You have been working on and off on Proust adapta-
tions for film and the theater over many years. For instance, you adapted and
translated À la recherche du temps perdu into Dutch (with Céline Linssen)
for Ro-Theatre, which was turned into four evenings in the theater by the
well-known Flemish director, Guy Cassiers. As an essayist and novelist, you
wrote about Proust in your nonfiction work Het teruggevonden kind (the
child rediscovered), in which you addressed the question of how different
176 Stories

writers wrote about and rediscovered their childhood years while writing
fiction or nonfiction. In that book, Proust seems to have been a source of
inspiration to you once again and, after working with Chantal Akerman on La
captive, you adapted the script for the theater: Les intermittences du coeur.
What made you want to work on the notoriously unfilmable Proust together?
Eric de Kuyper: Since her adolescence, Chantal was an obsessive reader –
actually more than being a film buff. She discovered À la recherche when she
was still at school, whereas I read it some years later (in 1971), initially because
of her warm recommendation. At the time, she had no thought of making
a film based on Proust. On the contrary, Chantal developed her own film
oeuvre, alternating between fiction and documentary, and writing her own
scenarios. A not-so-happy interlude was her project to adapt Isaac Bashevis
Singer’s two novels about nineteenth-century Jewish life in Poland, The
Manor and The Estate. This would have been a big production, and needed
Hollywood-scale participation. I worked with her on a script, which I think was
quite impressive. However, the film was never made. She was rather uneasy
about one aspect of the project: the historical background. She pretended not
to have a “historical imagination,” claiming that she could not “see the past.”
AvdO: So what about the past in Proust, then?
EdK: When she asked me to work on an adaptation of Proust in 1999, I was
rather surprised. Having just reread the work, with much more pleasure
than the first time, I was curious to find out how she would approach this
complex and labyrinthine novel, with its fabulous cast of characters, its rich
evocation of a period and society and, above all, its intricate plot. Volker
Schlöndorff made his Proust film Swann in Love in 1984 and Raoul Ruiz
his Le temps retrouvé in 1999. Sadly, the Visconti-Pinter project was
never realized.
AvdO: But you wanted to find out how she intended to approach Proust,
already knowing what she liked and did not like in films in general?
EdK: Indeed. I went to the movies with Chantal a lot, at times when we were
working and living together so, for instance, I could easily imagine how she
would have reacted to a film like Inception (2010). After ten minutes or so,
she would have fallen asleep, waking up just ten minutes before the end.
She would, however, have a clear opinion about the movie – in this case,
probably something like: “I don’t like the works by Escher …” At the time,
however, I thought, how strange that she would have wanted to make a film
of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. It was certainly one of the more
complex literary works of all time and one about which so much has been
written in all languages.
AvdO: Was she fascinated by Proust’s complexity?
Rewriting Proust 177

EdK: I don’t think so. From the beginning, there was no doubt in Chan-
tal’s mind: much as she liked many episodes in the novel, and was fascinated
by the many colorful characters, she only wanted to make the film about
the relationship between Marcel and Albertine. More precisely, she wanted
to work on the theme of “jealousy in a love affair.” So, without any problem,
she could rid herself of the historical context of Proust’s novel.
AvdO: No “things past,” then, in this film?
EdK: No things past, no “remembrance.” From the start, this was to be a film
in the present tense, and strictly chronological, which could be considered
very “anti-Proustian.”
AvdO: And what about the plot, if the f ilm was meant to focus on the
relationship between Marcel and Albertine?
EdK: In her fiction, Chantal was rarely interested in a plot. She thought of
a film story as characters in specific situations and, of course, of characters
in different locations. After all, she was also the very talented documentary
filmmaker that we know, and her way of developing film narratives was
always to work in the present, in the continuity of time. Flashbacks, she felt,
were “obscene” or “unnatural.” So, in La captive, the character of Marcel
was central, and the object of his jealousy, Albertine, more or less secondary.
As there was already a film called La prisonnière (Henri-Georges Clouzot,
1968), which is actually the French title of the novel that tells the story of
Marcel and Albertine, Chantal chose an equivalent which is, perhaps, still
more evocative: La captive – the captivated. This title also suggests the
ambivalence of “captivation.” Who is captivating whom?
AvdO: As you told me soon after Chantal Akerman’s death, to your own
surprise, writing the script proved quite easy.
EdK: Yes, it was, except for one passage, which I will come back to. We
were also quite surprised at how good – meaning “how useful for an
­A kerman movie” – the original dialogue turned out to be. That’s to say, it
completely satisfied Chantal, in terms of how she wanted the tonality of La
captive to be. It was rarely difficult to cut the written dialogue and, if
necessary, add our own in a natural “Proustian” style! We felt like the writer
himself, working on his manuscript (as we know from his own manuscripts
and what he called his “paperoles”): erasing, adding, changing … We were
rewriting Proust, which is a curious and exciting experience.
AvdO: Rewriting? So this was not really a literary adaption?
EdK: It wasn’t … She liked dialogue, people who talk, but none of her films,
and certainly not La captive, are what one could call “literary” in the
way that, for instance, those of Marguerite Duras are. And psychological
portraiture was not Chantal’s thing either: she wanted the emotions to be
178 Stories

there, filling the context or, rather, emanating from the context: most of
all from, and in, the rooms. Everyday life with a twist, one could say (as we
might say of her Jeanne Dielman).
Therefore, is it not strange that this adaptation, which refused many of
the Proustian devices is, in the end, so close to Proust’s universe? This, even
the most traditional Proustians have to admit, don’t you think?
AvdO: La captive focuses on a very small part of À la recherche?
EdK: Yes – on a very small fragment of one part of À la recherche: magnifying
it and then observing with the camera-lens what happens. Moreover, the
novel itself does not have a real ending for the Marcel-Albertine relationship,
which in a typical Proustian fashion, flows away … and, we felt, not in the
most satisfactory manner. The hesitations of the novelist did not seem useful
for the conclusion of our movie. To end a film narrative is to affirm that “this
is a movie.” An installation, or any other way of looking at a “movie,” never
has the temporal closure that a film intended for viewing in a theater has.
Thus, the ending, not so much in terms of content (the dialogue) as in
context and location, includes the most radical changes. The couple is in
a kind of union-disunion state (compare this, for instance, with Rossel-
lini’s Viaggio in Italia, 1954), on their way to Biarritz, where they will
stay at the fabulous Hotel du Palais. After the enclosure of the Parisian
apartment, it becomes a kind of road-movie.
AvdO: How was your joint work organized practically?
EdK: We rarely worked together on a script for more than two hours a day,
in the morning. In the afternoon, Chantal wrote some scenes that we had
discussed in our morning session. But all day long, during our cooking,
shopping, reading, we never stopped thinking and talking about the film.
During our daily chats, I reminded Chantal of A Star Is Born (George Cukor,
1954) where, near the end, through the reflections in the big windows, one
sees James Mason swimming far away into the sea. I also told her that, when I
was working for the cinémathèque in Amsterdam, I used to screen a short
silent film, Zweimal gelebt (Max Mack, 1912), in which we see, in a very
long shot, a woman rowing on a lake.
In La captive, it is Marcel who is seen rowing in such a way in the last
shot, having failed to save Albertine from her – accidental or voluntary?
– death by drowning. I used to screen that silent film accompanied by
Rachmaninov’s The Isle of the Dead, a piece that Chantal eventually used
in her film.
So even if some ideas came from me as her cowriter, Chantal never al-
lowed me to write them down. She was the writer. I want to admit this, not
because I felt frustrated as a cowriter. On the contrary: it is rather exciting to
Rewriting Proust 179

identify yourself with somebody else’s imagination. In a way, it is like acting:

becoming another character. I always think that I am there as cowriter,
only to help the filmmaker I work with in making a script as rich and as
close to their vision as possible. A cowriter is not a cofilmmaker; in fact, as
a filmmaker, I make films my own way!
AvdO: You have already said that she was a writer.
EdK: The written word was the real basis of her filming, at least for her
fiction. She only felt safe to embark on the shooting phase when the script
was finished the way she wanted it: carefully written. For filming fiction,
she needed text! This was not the case for her nonfiction films. I contrast
this with another filmmaker whom I have worked with several times, the
Swiss Jacqueline Veuve, who could not make her documentaries without
careful research, which to my eyes, knowing her way of shooting and editing,
was a purely academic exercise (well, she was an anthropologist). Chantal
went into the making of her nonfiction, her documentaries, without any
serious preparation: “J’étais là; telle chose m’advint” (I was there, and this
happened to me). It was the French poet, Jean de la Fontaine, who said this,
but it could be the programmatic saying of a journalist. Of course, for films
such as Hotel Monterey (1975), News from Home (1977), Sud (1999), D’Est
(1993), the positioning of her camera-look was chosen with care. But she did
not read and study dozens of books before shooting, like Jacqueline Veuve.
AvdO: When the script of La captive was finished, and the production
under way, the perilous phase of casting Marcel and Albertine began …
EdK: Chantal’s choices were rather surprising. I could see why she wanted
Sylvie Testud for Albertine, and I think it was the right decision not to have
chosen a more glamorous actress. Indeed, Testud gives a very contemporary
touch to Albertine. However, I had my doubts about Stanislas Merhar. His
appearance is as far from the images of Proust/Marcel as one can imagine.
For a start, he doesn’t look like an intellectual … But after seeing the film,
I was totally convinced that her choice was right. Merhar had the behavior
and appearance of a rich boy, spoiled, incapable of being immersed in
a great love affair. His smoothness was in contrast to a tender fragility.
Indeed, a more conventional actor would have taken us back to the past, the
historical background of the novel. With the choice of Merhar and Testud,
contemporaneity was there right from the start.
AvdO: You worked on other projects together, didn’t you?
EdK: Apart from La captive and the Singer project, I worked with Chantal on
other adaptations. Most of them were abandoned, like Patricia Highsmith’s The
Price of Salt (later made by Todd Haynes as Carol, 2015). We were not satisfied
with the last part of the novel: we didn’t know what to do with the child.
180 Stories

In my opinion, this problem was not solved by Haynes either. As for the
adaptation of Colette’s Chéri (which would have been coupled in our version
with La Fin de Chéri), we completed a very satisfactory script, again in a
contemporary setting, but had to stop because of problems with the rights,
which happened to be sold already to Stephen Frears, as we found out; and
his version of Chéri came out in 2009. All these years, when not working on
her own fiction, or on documentaries and later installations, Chantal also
regularly talked about her wish to work on “a Dostoevsky.” I think Robert
Bresson’s Une femme douce (1969) shows that adapting Dostoevsky would not
have been impossible for her. Bresson’s film has a contemporary setting, too.
AvdO: And Joseph Conrad?
EdK: She worked on Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly, which became the last fiction
film she made, in 2011. I would like to add this. I already mentioned how
writing was important to Chantal. May I say that her real, hidden ambition
was to be a writer! All the years we worked together, I was impressed by
her passion for the written word. I regularly told her that she should work
in that direction, too. “I’m too lazy,” she would say. Lazy? Well, for working
on a novel one must have a kind of discipline that she perhaps did not have.
One is on one’s own as a writer. In filmmaking, however, the team functions
much like a mechanic obliging the film director to keep going!
Maybe this was one of the reasons why her relationship with someone
like Marguerite Duras, a writer and filmmaker, was always tense (although
they had Delphine Seyrig as a mutual friend). Anyway, Akerman wrote two
autobiographical texts: Une famille à Bruxelles (1998) and Ma mère rit (2013).
AvdO: Did you also like her as a writer?
EDK: As a writer, I learned a lot from the way in which she wrote: “Just put
it down like you are saying it.” At the beginning of our friendship, I often
wondered why her pictures were so good. “How do you do it?” I asked her.
“You just click …” In the same way, she taught me how to cook: you just do
it! Always fresh and direct.

References and Further Reading

Akerman, Chantal. 1998. Une famille à Bruxelles. Paris. L’Arche Éditeur.

—. 2013. Ma mère rit. Paris: Mercure de France.
De Kuyper, Eric, and Annie van den Oever. 2015. “Temps mort: Speaking about Chantal Akerman
(1950-2015).” Necsus (Fall). https://necsus-ejms.org/temps-mort-speaking-about-chantal-
akerman-1950-2015/.
13. Introduction to Dickensian
An Intertextual Universe?

Ian Christie

The characters in each of Charles Dickens’s novels belong to that work alone.
Each novel, from The Pickwick Papers to the unfinished Mystery of Edwin
Drood, has its own cast and range of settings – its distinctive “world.” But
what if these worlds did overlap, creating a larger “Dickensian” universe in
which characters might meet and jointly create new shared storylines? The
result would go beyond Dickens and might be “Dickensian,” but would it
be Dickens? As if to test this proposition, BBC Television commissioned a
unique drama series in 2015, which drew on the popular dramatic skills of
one of Britain’s most experienced television scriptwriters and “showrunners,”
to create a “Dickensian” universe across a twenty-part series.
But in what ways was this unique? From Dickens’s own era, we can
think immediately of Balzac’s great Comédie Humaine, in which a range of
characters recur in over ninety texts, some of them more than twenty times,
and many others less frequently. We can also think of the great multipart
or series novels of the twentieth century, which follow a small group of
characters across a span of time, from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du
temps perdu to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Or, perhaps,
the characters whose exploits are recounted in novels and stories which
maintain a certain consistency of detail: in England, Sherlock Holmes and
Dr. Watson, and Bertie Wooster with his servant, Jeeves, would be obvious
candidates.
Early cinema would latch onto these established and widely translated
favorites, and quickly translate them into screen series. Sherlock Holmes
became the archetypal modern detective in a series of film adaptations from
as early as 1900; while “Nick Carter” became an indefinitely extendible cypher
for an American equivalent in print from 1886, and thereafter promiscuously
on-screen, with no unique authorial obligations to maintain. The “franchise,”
referring to a named (and copyrighted) character or milieu has, of course,
become a staple of modern narrative entertainment. However, the case of
Dickensian (2015-2016) posed challenges over the issues of high/low culture,
and the integrity of an author’s work as originally conceived.
In this respect, it may be worth recalling the Wars of the Roses adaptation
of Shakespeare’s English history plays, first performed to wide acclaim by
182 Stories

the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963. This involved reordering four of

Shakespeare’s plays dealing with conflict between the Lancaster and York
dynasties, and included the interpolation of new verse by the adapter, John
Barton. The result, both onstage and later in television adaptation, was widely
considered to have revived the reputation of some of Shakespeare’s least
popular plays – by reshaping them into a new dramatic form. Interfering
with the central figure in English literature is clearly a different matter from
adapting Dickens, long regarded as a popular rather than canonic figure.
But a broader view of literary and cultural history reveals that no authors
have been immune to often drastic reshaping and adaptations of their work.
Should Dickensian therefore be considered more the latest instance of
this process of adapting classical authors to the formats and sensibilities
of the era – like removing “brutality” from Shakespeare in the seventeenth
century; or producing comic-book versions of literary classics in the twenti-
eth century? Or did it represent a significant experiment in exploring and
updating the “fictional universe” of a popular author? Or, as a product of
the contemporary world of television fiction, was it closer to such series as
Black Mirror (2011- ), acknowledging its debt to the earlier Sci-Fi series
The Twilight Zone (1985-1989), anticipating the Sony/Amazon Electric
Dreams (2017- ) series, based on Philip K. Dick’s stories?
Luke McKernan’s essay on Dickensian, which was developed from an
original blog post, explores some of these issues, while also paying tribute
to a rare, and so far more unique, experiment in “popular Dickensian soap-
opera.” Is this a path still to be followed in television fiction?
14. The Lives of the Characters in
Dickensian
Luke McKernan

On Christmas Eve, sometime during the 1840s, in a warren of London

streets, a number of people are facing crises in their lives. Amelia and
Arthur Havisham have attended their father’s funeral and have returned
to their home, Satis House. Outside, the moneylender, Jacob Marley, scowls
at the cheerful Mrs. Gamp, then sends a boy with a message to Fagin. He
runs past Mr. and Mrs. Bumble as he does so. Elsewhere, Marley’s business
partner, Ebeneezer Scrooge, passes by the Old Curiosity Shop, which has
a notice saying it is closed owing to illness. Inside, a dangerously ill Little
Nell is tended to by her grandfather and a bibulous Mrs. Gamp. At Scrooge
and Marley’s office, their assistant learns that there has been a deduction
in his wages, but prompt payment of a loan is still expected of him. Sensing
that he must move quickly to gain a financial advantage, Scrooge asks for
the Old Curiosity Shop account. At Satis House, Amelia is comforted by
her good friend, Honoria Barbary, whose hapless father is facing financial
ruin. Arthur Havisham starts to plot against his sister, with an accomplice,
Compeyson. In his den, Fagin tells the prostitute, Nancy, that she has an
appointment with Jacob Marley that evening. She shivers with fear …1
The opening episode of the British television series Dickensian intro-
duced viewers to the back stories of characters from Charles Dickens’s
novels. These stories then unfolded and intertwined over the series. The
roots of Great Expectations, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, The
Old Curiosity Shop and others were imagined as having come from a single
narrative source, a journey by suggestion into the mind of Charles Dickens,
reinventing his oeuvre as a Balzacian Comédie Humaine, with interlocking
characters across the different novels, revealing a fully realized alternative
world. The figure that initially pulls all these characters and their personal
stories together is Jacob Marley. By the end of the first episode, we see that
almost everyone has good reason to wish him dead, and then his body is
found lying in an alley. The mystery of who killed him must then, of course,
be investigated by Inspector Bucket, the detective from Bleak House.
Dickensian was the invention of British television scriptwriter, Tony
Jordan, creator or cocreator of such popular series as Hustle (2004-2012)
and Life on Mars (2006-2007). He is best known as the lead writer of nearly
184 Stories

three decades of the BBC soap opera EastEnders (1985- ). Jordan has written
that his interest in Charles Dickens as source material began when he was
invited to present an episode of the BBC series The Secret Life of Books
(2014- ), on Great Expectations (Jordan 2014). The program explored Dickens’s
art through the eyes of an expert soap-opera writer: the serial nature of
publication, the use of cliff-hangers, the interwoven personal stories, and
the high appeal to a mass audience. Inspired by a sense of affinity, Jordan
then set about writing Dickensian, a twenty-part series of 30-minute
episodes produced by his own Red Planet Pictures. The connection between
Dickens and soap opera has been made on many occasions. Jordan set
out to prove his case, but rather than adapt any of Dickens’s works – as
has often been done on British television – he would appropriate and mix
aspects of them all. In the world of Dickensian, Fagin (Oliver Twist) rubs
shoulders with Scrooge (A Christmas Carol), Inspector Bucket (Bleak House)
crosses with Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol), a fawning Mr. Bumble (Oliver
Twist) plays host to Gradgrind (Hard Times), and Amelia Havisham (known
only as “Miss Havisham” in Great Expectations: her first name is Jordan’s
invention) is best friends with Honoria Barbary (Bleak House). The three
main narratives are the Marley murder, the Barbary bankruptcy, and the
false wooing of Miss Havisham. However, several smaller stories unfold:
the Bumbles’ hapless attempts at social advancement, a romance between
Peter Cratchit and Little Nell, and Sikes freeing Nancy from Fagin’s control
(Oliver Twist). In addition, there are many wry references to other parts of
the Dickens canon: the orders for an unseen Mr. Pickwick being taken at
the Three Cripples pub, Honoria working at Mantalini’s dressmakers (as
featured in Nicholas Nickleby), Uriah Heep named as Jaggers’s secretary
(combining David Copperfield with Great Expectations), and Oliver Twist
asking for more. It begins with A Christmas Carol (“Marley was dead: to
begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that”). It ends at the point
where Great Expectations could begin, the jilted bride asserting that, from
this point onward, time for her would stand still.
What could merely have been a clever intellectual exercise revealed
itself to be an original and ingenious entertainment. You could see the
delight in the actors’ eyes at the quality of the writing and the piquancy of
the situations in which they found themselves. It is arguable that twenty
episodes was too long, with the series’ structural logic torn between the
endless unfolding of a soap opera and the expected conclusion of a time-
limited narrative, the difference between what Robert C. Allen (1995) in
his studies of the soap-opera form defined as open and closed serials (the
various narratives are all resolved by the final episode, featuring Amelia
The Lives of the Char ac ters in Dickensian 185

Havisham’s disastrous wedding day). At its weakest, Dickensian overplayed

the obvious (in particular, the Miss Havisham strand). At its best, it was as
good a television drama as Britain had ever known.
In particular, Episode 16, in which Honoria Barbary (played by Sophie
Rundle) gives birth, aided only by her embittered sister, Frances (Alexandra
Moen), was among the best 30 minutes of televised drama that this writer has
ever seen. While previous episodes had criss-crossed over the series’ different
story strands in the usual soap-opera manner, this episode concentrated on
the one story alone with remorseless intensity and extraordinary effect, from
the panic leading up to the birth to the shock of the dilemma Frances puts
herself in at the end of the episode (the outcome of which would be known
only to those who had read Bleak House). In writing, pacing, performance,
lighting, decorative detail, and use of our knowledge of the characters’ pasts
to create tension and force climax, this was a program to hold up as the
best of what the medium can achieve. It was also a convincing argument
for why literature belongs on the screen.2
It can often seem that we are growing bored of the classics, and must
mangle them to sustain our jaded appetites. Sequels and prequels, moderni-
zations, parodies, and revered characters battling with the living dead – as
in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) – seem to express an ennui,
an admission that no one has the patience to read novels any more, or else
frustration at some great novelists not having written more than they did.
On its announcement, Dickensian sounded as though it was going to be
yet another example of this syndrome, a desperate stirring of the ingredients
to try and come up with something new to attract ratings. Instead, it showed
that there was life in these characters beyond that set down on the page by
Charles Dickens – and that reimagining the classics need not be sacrilege, but
can be insightful, and even necessary, when it is done well. It showed how
characters on the page remain in our minds because they live convincing
lives. Those lives can be sustained in other forms, where there is enough
imagination and belief. Indeed, to sustain those convincing lives, it may
be as important to reimagine such stories as it is to read them. We can no
longer read past works as those in the past did, because we are different
people (different in terms of outlook and our sense of time). Nevertheless,
if those works’ status as art is to endure, then reimagining them becomes
an essential part of how we continue to tell them. This, however, does not
mean Little Dorrit and the undead – it implies getting inside the mind of
the author and plucking out something new along with the familiar. This
is exactly what Tony Jordan and his team did: they visualized “the mind of
Charles Dickens” – and, in doing so, recalled Robert William Buss’s painting
186 Stories

Dickens’s Dream (1875), which is well known in Britain and which showed
the author surrounded by a phantasmagoric gathering of his “characters.”3
Dickensian was an artistic success, but audiences showed a mixed
response. The first two episodes were broadcast on BBC One, separated by
an hour, on December 26, 2015. The timing was completely appropriate, but
thereafter the series suffered from erratic scheduling. The time slots of the
episodes appeared to change each week, making it difficult for audiences
to get into the program’s routine in the same manner as they would with a
conventional soap opera, which had clearly been the producers’ intention. 4
This seems to have been caused partly by uncertainty on the part of the BBC
as to how best to present the series, but also to some degree a consequence
of waning audience interest early on. The first two episodes attracted an
audience of 5 million and 4.3 million respectively (excluding later catch-up
figures), but dropped steadily thereafter, down to two million by the time
of the twentieth episode (Martinson 2016).
Every effort had been made to give the series a broad appeal. The produc-
tion values were high, with a reported £10m [$14m] being spent, including
the construction of a large single-set boasting 27 two-storey buildings and a
90-meter [98yd] cobbled street that placed the Dickensian characters in close
proximity to one another (Burrell 2015). The cast was particularly strong:
Stephen Rea (Inspector Bucket), Tuppence Middleton (Miss Havisham),
Anton Lesser (Fagin), Caroline Quentin (Mrs. Bumble), Pauline Collins
(Mrs. Gamp), Omid Djalili (Mr. Venus) and Peter Firth (Jacob Marley) among
them. The faces were as familiar as the characters.
Yet something, beyond the troublesome scheduling, did not quite work.
Critics were, for the most part, generous with their praise, admiring the wit
of the conception and the style of its realization. Still, some felt a nagging
sense of an uncertainty of purpose, perhaps best expressed by Ben Dowell
in Radio Times:

[T]he first and most obvious question to ask is this: they may have the
same names and look like they are described in the books but who are
these people? Can they really be said to be Dickens characters? The great
Victorian novelist invented these richly drawn characters to f it into
the novels he wrote. He was a storyteller, first and foremost, someone
who wrote episodic narratives driven by the unstoppable force of his
ingeniously-crafted [sic] plots. He populated his books with amazing
characters, of course, but tearing them away from their stories is to es-
sentially denude them of their essential life and being. […] If I am quite
honest I couldn’t see the point of this exercise which failed to teach us
The Lives of the Char ac ters in Dickensian 187

anything new about any of Dickens’ characters, or allowed them to develop

in any meaningful way. (2015)

For Dowell, the problem was that Dickensian wasn’t Dickens. The characters
existed within the fictions that had been originally created for them. They
did not have, or could not have, exterior lives. The exercise was clever, but
added nothing to Dickens’s expression of those people, whose reason for
being existed solely within his pages.
While this is an understandable line of argument, it is fundamentally
false. Writers do not own the characters that they create, nor the works
in which such characters may be found. Of course, in a legal sense, such
ownership may exist. Charles Dickens raged against the American “pirates”
who republished or adapted his original creations, in the absence of any
international copyright legislation (such as was first introduced in 1886
with the Berne Convention). Copyright law identifies particular rights of
ownership that lie with the originator of a creative work, but it is a different
matter when one considers how people read. Ownership of the play of a
creative work upon the imagination lies with any individual reader (or
viewer), and more than stories, we feel that we own the characters. If the
author has imbued any life in them at all, then our imaginations must flesh
out what is presented to us on the printed page. We want to know what
will happen to them; we want to know where they came from. They lead
convincing lives.
This is the sentimental tendency against which the critic, L.C. Knights,
famously railed in his, How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933). A great
work of fiction, Knights argued, is not driven by the personal but by the
thematic. Characters exist inasmuch as they support the governing ideas.
Speculation on their lives beyond that which was the express purpose of
the artist is fatuous, as critical enquiry. But that does not stop the reader
from such speculation, nor the writer who might want to capitalize on such
enthusiasm. Tony Jordan expressed such enthusiasm when he considered
Miss Havisham:

I have always been fascinated by the character of Miss Havisham – this

mad woman in a wedding dress and veil, sitting at the table, jilted on the
day of her wedding, an event she found so traumatic that she never took
off her wedding dress. We’ve all seen that image and we all know it, so I
was interested in how she got to be that woman. What was she like as a
young woman and in love? Did she laugh? Who was she? What did she
care about? So I decided that was one of the first stories I wanted to tell,
188 Stories

it was exciting because nobody had ever seen the young Miss Havisham
before – it was then that I knew I had something. (2015a)

Prequels and sequels to the classics, from Mary Cowden Clarke’s series
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (a
prequel to Jane Eyre), to the mini-industry that is the Jane Austen sequel
novel (such as Emma Tennant’s Pemberley: Or Pride and Prejudice Continued),
all betray the urge to extend our belief. The film industry is sustained by
sequels and prequels that recapitulate narrative elements and particular
characters that a mass audience will pay to see once again.
The digital era has created a thirst for the extension of narrative and
character, and provided the means to achieve this online, for example,
fan fiction, in which the fans of a creative work publish their own stories
developed out of the original characters or settings. Some authors have
embraced this development of their imaginative originals (J.K. Rowling),
while others have reacted angrily against it (Anne Rice, George R.R. Martin).
Either way, the evidence is clear: stories and characters have lives of their
own. We appropriate them through our affection. Once you have asked
how many children Lady Macbeth had, someone will want to know the
answer – and someone will set out to provide that answer. Lady Macbeth’s
other life matters.
Various commentators have suggested a link between Dickensian
and fan fiction, though Tony Jordan denies any connection. However, the
fundamental motivation was the same. In the same interview, Jordan says
that “it had to be about taking ownership of the characters, after all Dickens
never wrote a scene between Scrooge and Fagin, or between a young Miss
Havisham and Martha Cratchit, but I had to do just that” (2015b). The com-
pulsion lay in that sense of ownership. This derives, fundamentally, from
the sense of entitlement that the sharing of content over the Internet has
engendered. It is not just about the assertion of a postcopyright age where
former boundaries no longer apply. It is about a release of the imagination
created by opportunity. The age of the copy is producing stories that must
exist because they are copies.
Dickens himself was said to have appropriated characters, turning people
that he met into figures on a page. It is a common accusation, but except
for certain romans à clef, it is a misleading one. Peter Ackroyd writes of
this tendency:

Dickens used certain salient characteristics of the people whom he met or

knew, but there are very few instances when he simply transcribed what
The Lives of the Char ac ters in Dickensian 189

he had seen and heard onto the page. The novelist’s art is not of that kind:
Dickens perceived a striking characteristic, or mood, or piece of behaviour,
and then in his imagination proceeded to elaborate upon it until the
“character” bears only a passing resemblance to the real person. In his
fiction Dickens entered a world of words which has its own procedures
and connections, so that the original “being” of any individual is subsumed
into something much larger and generally much more conclusive. (1990, 65)

As with Dickens and real life, so it was with Tony Jordan and Dickens.
Salient characteristics have been appropriated to build a fresh creative
work. Dickensian is not Dickens; it is Dickensian. It takes ownership of
the characters and settings to make sense of them in a world of the new
writer’s invention.
In an essay on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, V.S. Pritchett considered the
meaning of the word “Dickensian” in relation to style and characters. Arguing
that much of what is understood as Dickensian in style is an inheritance
from Sterne, Smollett, and Richardson, Pritchett looked instead at Dickens’s
people:

[T]he distinguishing quality of Dickens’s people is that they are solitaries.

They are people caught living in a world of their own. They soliloquise in
it. They do not talk to one another; they talk to themselves. The pressure
of society has created fits of twitching in mind and speech, and fantasies
in the soul. […] In how many of that famous congress of “characters” –
Micawber, Barkis, Moddles, Jingle, Mrs. Gamp or Miss Twitterton: take
them at random – and in how many of the straight personages, like Jasper
and Neville Landless in Edwin Drood, are we chiefly made aware of the
individual’s obliviousness of any existence but his own? (1998, 85)

For Pritchett, Dickens’s characters are “all out of touch and out of hearing
of each other, each conducting its own inner monologue,” a disassociation
he identifies as having its roots in “the fright of childhood” (1998, 90). Quite
the opposite is the case with Dickensian. In this world, which is the world
of the soap opera, existence is defined by the individuals’ relations to others.
They form an organic piece, no element of which has meaning except for the
way in which it impacts on the fate of the other elements. The rapid cutting
from one story element to another reinforces the sense of characters bound
together by an overarching narrative whose direction, indeed existence, they
do not sense – for the most part. Soap operas are sustained dramatically by
the idea of the community that they portray, even if Tony Jordan’s hugely
190 Stories

successful EastEnders regularly challenges the idea of community as

something that is still valid in modern times (the characters, particularly
in the early years of EastEnders, would speak of better, more communal
times in the past – maybe as far back as the 1840s) (Geraghty 1995). If there
is a childhood root in this to complement that identified in Dickens by
Pritchett, then it is the urge to belong. However, this does not lie in the
writer but in the readership, who yearn to own what they see.
There are moments when a realization of community and shared destiny
are made apparent, most notably when Nancy (played by Bethany Muir) sings
at the Three Cripples, on occasions where many of the leading characters have
gathered in that same place (a pub, the Queen Vic, is the communal centerpiece
of EastEnders). This occurs at the end of Episode 10 and, especially, at the
end of the final episode, where her rendition of “I dreamt I dwelt in marble
halls” touches every heart within, the camera panning from face to face, as
all set aside private troubles and find themselves caught up in the collective
sentiment. Beyond, but at the same time, Miss Havisham weeps at the table
with her wedding feast; Arthur Havisham, his selfish plans in ruins, prepares
to commit suicide; the ghostly voice of Marley is heard by Scrooge; and Oliver
Twist is taken in by the Artful Dodger. No one, we learn, can exist alone.
The fatal flaw of Dickensian was that it could not escape its cleverness.
It wanted to tell a set of good stories, through engrossing characters, in a
particularly televisual form. It did so, most successfully, but all the while
it was inviting the viewer to see how ingeniously the pieces of the puzzle
had been put together. There was an expectation, at least to a degree, that
the viewer would be familiar with the novels, so that they would recognize
the people involved and have a sense of their fate. Prequels can only be
read with an understanding that their conclusion must be to arrive at the
starting point of a story with which we are familiar. But despite countless
film and television adaptations, and the familiarity of certain characters,
the mass audience’s grasp of why these characters came together in the
way that they did was probably not all that Jordan might have hoped for.
Paradoxically, what hampered Dickensian was its allegiance to Dickens.
No matter how widely the writer’s imagination might range, the ending could
only be to return to Dickens. The ownership conferred by originality never
goes away. So it was that, despite good reviews and a fervent body of fans,
Dickensian was not recommissioned by the BBC. This is surely a great loss,
because there was every promise of Jordan’s creation seeking out endings
beyond what were Dickens’s starting points. Jordan had storylined sixty
episodes, pointing out that Dickens had created over 2,000 characters and
so far he had only used around twenty five (Burrell 2015). Perhaps several
The Lives of the Char ac ters in Dickensian 191

such works of art remain unmade. It is as tragic as a burned manuscript,

a what-might-have-been that could still be reality if only someone was
braver, and the schedulers more consistent. In some alternative universe,
Dickensian Series 2 and 3 can, perhaps, be seen, bringing delight at their
ingenuity and pleasure at how they extend the art of a great novelist through
characters that are owned by all of us. But not in this one.

Notes

1. This essay has been developed from a 2016 blog post, “Dickensian,” on my
personal site: http://lukemckernan.com/2016/04/22/dickensian.
2. Britain has a long tradition of debate, and scholarship, on the subject of
literary adaptation for television. For an overview, see Cardwell (2002).
3. This painting, often reproduced, now belongs to the Dickens Museum
in Britain. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens#/media/
File:Dickens_dream.jpg. A nineteenth-century American wood engrav-
ing echoes the contemporary belief that Dickens’s characters possessed a
life of their own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens#/media/
File:Charles_Dickens_characters.jpg.
4. The original broadcast dates (all BBC One) were: Episode 1: tx. December
26, 2015; 2: tx. December 26, 2015; 3: tx. December 27, 2015; 4: tx. December
27, 2015; 5: tx. January 1, 2016; 6: tx. January 6, 2016; 7: tx. January 7, 2016; 8:
tx. January 13, 2016; 9: tx. January 14, 2016; 10: tx. January 21, 2016; 11: tx. Janu-
ary 22, 2016; 12: tx. January 27, 2016; 13: tx. January 28, 2016; 14: tx. February 4,
2017; 15: tx. February 5, 2017; 16: tx. February 11, 2016; 17: tx. February 12, 2016;
18: tx. February 18, 2016; 19: tx. February 19, 2016; 20: tx. February 21, 2016.

References and Further Reading

Ackroyd, Peter. 1990. Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.

Allen, Robert C. 1995. “Introduction.” In To Be Continued…: Soap Operas Around the World, edited
by Robert C. Allen, 17-24. London: Routledge.
Burrell, Ian. 2015. “‘Dickensian’ Is the BBC’s Biggest Christmas Offering: When Fagin Met Scrooge.”
The Independent, December 1, 2015. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/fea-
tures/dickensian-is-the-bbcs-biggest-christmas-offering-when-fagin-met-scrooge-a6756276.
html.
Cardwell, Sarah. 2002. Adaptation, Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Dowell, Ben. 2015. “Soapy and silly – What the Dickens Is the BBC Up to in Its Latest Drama Series
Dickensian?” Radio Times, December 26, 2015. http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-12-26/
soapy-and-silly-what-the-dickens-is-the-bbc-up-to-in-its-latest-drama-series-dickensian.
192 Stories

Farber, Alex. 2016. “Festive Ratings Highlights: Sherlock, Dickensian & Fungus.” Broadcast,
January 4, 2016. http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/ratings/festive-ratings-highlights-sherlock-
dickensian-and-fungus/5098483.article.
Geraghty, Christine. 1995. “Social Issues and Realist Soaps: A Study of British Soaps in the
1980/1990s.” In To Be Continued…: Soap Operas Around the World, edited by Robert C. Allen,
70. London: Routledge.
Jordan, Tony. 2014. “I Turned Down the Chance to Research Charles Dickens for a TV Series
Nine Times … Then I Found a Kindred Spirit.” The Independent, August 27, 2014. http://www.
independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/tony-jordan-i-turned-down-the-chance-
to-research-charles-dickens-for-a-tv-series-nine-times-then-i-9695398.html.
—. 2015a. BBC Media Centre, December 9, 2015.
—. 2015b. “Creating Dickensian.” BBC Writers Room (blog), December 22, 2015. http://www.bbc.
co.uk/blogs/writersroom/entries/29d1d218-a710-45ab-96c5-7ac9a6d86a87.
Knights, L.C. 1933. How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?: An Essay in the Theory and Practice
of Shakespeare Criticism. Cambridge: Gordon Fraser.
Martinson, Jane. 2016. “BBC Axes Dickensian after One Series.” The Guardian, April 21, 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/21/bbc-axes-dickensian-after-one-series.
McKernan, Luke. 2016. “Dickensian.” Luke Mckernan (blog). http://lukemckernan.com/2016/04/22/
dickensian.
Pritchett, V.S. 1998. “Edwin Drood.” In The Pritchett Century: The Selected Writings of V.S. Pritchett.
London: Chatto & Windus.
15. Music Structuring Narrative
– A Dialogue
Robert Ziegler and Ian Christie

Ian Christie: You’ve worked with film music from a very wide range of
periods – in fact, all the way from resurrecting historical scores such as
Camille Saint-Saëns’s L’Assasinat du duc de guise (1908) and Pietro Mascagni’s
Rapsodia Satanica (1917), to conducting contemporary scores, such as those
by Jonny Greenwood for the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. Along the
way, you have also presented film music by many of the Hollywood greats
in concerts. Obviously, the role of film music has changed considerably
across the “sound period” as a whole since the early 1930s, but do you think
it has also changed significantly since, for instance, the time of Bernard
Herrmann – who actually wrote for Welles, Hitchcock, and Scorsese? Do
modern filmmakers expect different things from composers in terms of
making their films “work” as narratives?
Robert Ziegler: Technology has moved forward rapidly since Herrmann’s
time – everyone now has access to synchronization equipment, orchestral
samples, and an infinite supply of sound designs to make a sound track.
In fact, there is much more sound design (which is, in effect, organized
noise) in sound tracks than there used to be – sometimes to the exclusion
of conventionally composed music. There are also, for both commercial
and aesthetic reasons, a great deal more pop songs, which give the audience
an immediate indicator of the mood and aim of a film (see Scorsese and
Tarantino, for example). However, I think the role of music in making nar-
ratives convincing hasn’t really changed all that much. So much depends
on how the director uses the music.
I recently conducted a live performance accompanying a screening of
Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which was Herrmann’s last score in 1976. The
most instructive moment was in the opening sequence, when the martial
chords played by the brass and percussion underscore the scenes of the taxi
emerging from the smoke rising from the threatening New York streets. Then,
on a cut to a close-up of the driver’s (De Niro’s) eyes, the music switches to
a warm and sensual sax solo accompanied by lush strings. In a nutshell,
Herrmann and Scorsese have established the film’s singular tension: one
man trying to follow his heart in a city without mercy – a cliché perhaps,
but one presented here with great drama and finesse.
194 Stories

The widespread use of “temp tracks” is another not always welcome

innovation since Herrmann’s day. These are generic accompaniments added
while a film is being edited, which can lead to certain tracks being wedded in
the director’s mind to the film being made, as well as suggesting a preexisting
style for the composer to which to conform.
IC: I wonder how many viewers realize the effect of such widespread use of
this practice. I came across an online video essay by Tony Zhou in which he
asks a cross-section of people whether they can hum or whistle anything
from a Marvel film – and none of them can (Liptak 2016). Zhou quotes the
composer, Danny Elfman, on how directors become so attached to their
temp music that they ask composers to do more of the same. Therefore, he
argues that temp music tends to make films all sound the same and bland.
RZ: Well, today directors can ask composers to write music “on spec” before
the film has been made, or at least edited. Sometimes it will be used, and
sometimes not. This isn’t all bad, but it would have been an unthinkable
luxury in Herrmann’s day.
I’ve conducted a few new scores for Jonny Greenwood and Paul Thomas
Anderson. Paul asks Jonny for a lot of musical ideas very early in the produc-
tion process, sometimes before shooting has started. A great deal of music is
written and remains unused, but not unlistened to, and there’s a lot of groping
toward a particular mood or sound that goes on until Paul feels happy with
it. This happened on both There Will Be Blood (2007) and, more recently,
Phantom Thread (2017). So, depending on your point of view, this could be
thought of as a deeper collaboration between composer and director, or not.
These sorts of demands didn’t exist in Herrmann’s day (and I doubt he would
have submitted to them even if they had!), but they are increasingly common
now. Again, digital technology has a great deal to do with this. When you can
edit and cut and fiddle with a film (especially a technically complex film),
you need the music to be updated constantly. On a technically challenging
film, such as the The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), this was very
much the case. As Peter Jackson continued to edit and polish the film with its
extensive special effects, Howard Shore constantly had to adjust the score.1
Thus, in short, the role of music in supporting and structuring narra-
tive hasn’t changed all that much. You can try to change a mood or create
suspense without music, but it’s much easier and more effective to use it.
They make great partners as (unlike other art forms, such as painting and
literature) they both exist in time.
IC: “Supporting and structuring narrative”… But, of course, narratives have
changed too, with much less well-defined narrative arcs, use of “dead time”
and wide variations of pace that would have been unthinkable in the 1940s
Music Struc turing Narr ative – A Dialogue 195

and 1950s, and even later. I want to float an idea that might once have helped
us to make sense of this relationship, to see whether it makes sense to you
as a practicing film musician.
Erwin Panofsky, the great art historian, wrote an essay about “Style
and Medium in the Motion Pictures” in the early 1930s, and one of his key
ideas was that there was a “principle of co-expressibility” governing the
relationship between sound and image: “the sound cannot express any more
than is expressed by visible movement” (1966, 21). (Of course, we have to
remember that he was writing on the cusp of the transition to the Talkies,
which included adapting the conventions of continuous live accompanying
music and an incorporated score – which also had to leave the dialogue
audible). In a nutshell, his idea was that intensity of image – like a close-up
– required dialogue to be less prominent, and vice-versa.
I’m wondering whether Panofsky’s idea might also apply to the music/
picture relationship. If the image is intense or busy, does music necessarily
play a lesser role than when the image is quieter or less active?
RZ: That’s quite a broad assertion, though a very interesting one, that
intensity of image requires less accompaniment of any kind. I think in a
way, it supports the view that “pure” cinema is silent cinema – a director
can, if he wants, tell a whole story using only pictures.
Certainly, if the image is very busy, music can be a distraction. You can
find all sorts of exceptions to that rule but, in general, music functions
best when it’s not commenting directly on the image. The crudest example
would be “mickey mousing” the film, which refers to music that punctuates
every detail of the action, as was often done for comic effect in cartoons. In
fact, I believe that music is always at its best when it suggests an emotional
component of the film, or plays with memory and anticipation.
I remember conducting a newly commissioned score for Hitchcock’s
1927 silent film The Lodger.2 There were very few crucial “hit points,”
but if I were to miss one by a fraction of a second, it was always better to
be early rather than late. A late “hit” immediately telegraphed a mistake
to the audience, whereas an early one was accepted. This is because our
senses are used to hearing something first, and then looking to see what it
is, whether that’s a fire engine, a woman screaming, or an explosion. The
ear is our early warning system. So, in film, it’s usually the soundtrack that
tells us something is about to happen.
IC: I have another “case study” on which you might care to comment. Scorsese
was obviously attached to the tradition of Hollywood scoring that Herrmann
represented, and he had another of its last exponents, Elmer Bernstein, adapt
the original Hermann score for his remake of Cape Fear in 1992. But when it
196 Stories

came to his epic Gangs of New York (2002), having commissioned a score by
Bernstein, he largely decided to drop this in favor of period-type pieces with a
much simpler score credited to Howard Shore (Christie and Thompson 2003).3
RZ: I didn’t know this, but it’s another addition to the impressive list of
composers who’ve had entire scores thrown out! In the end, the harsh truth
is that it’s always the director’s film, and the composer can’t really expect to
write something that doesn’t support the film with discretion. I remember
an old arranger in LA saying that in film scoring, you should never start
telling another story with the music. The audience can’t take in two stories
at once “unless they have two heads.” Max Richter often refers to music as
the amniotic fluid in which the film exists.
IC: That’s an interesting metaphor: linking the process of a film’s conception
with its eventual public form. In his interviews about Gangs, Scorsese gave
an account of the growth of his own musical taste as “a process of discovery.”
He described his interest in the roots of the blues, and how he had heard some
traditional American folk music in a documentary by Alan Lomax, at the
time he was making Raging Bull (1980). He used to play fife and drum music
repeatedly during the years when he was hoping to make Gangs of New
York, and so it must have become deeply wedded to his conception of this
long-planned film – so that Bernstein would have seemed too “Hollywood,”
and Othar Turner and the Rising Sun Band now open and close the film! I
notice that Richter also said about a recent score, for the Western Hostiles
(2017), “the challenge is really how to calibrate what you’re doing and not
telling the audience what to think … judging how much to load up on to
each moment in terms of what the music is doing” (Richter 2018).
In terms of “not trying to do too much,” I was also struck by a recent review
of Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
(2017), where the reviewer commented on Carter Burwell’s score being
less distinctive than those he had written for the Coen brothers’ films.
But from my own viewing, the music in Three Billboards, while seem-
ingly unobtrusive, performs a wide range of functions, through quotation,
punctuation, and other kinds of “shaping.”
RZ: I saw Three Billboards as well and know Carter Burwell’s work. He
is a great example of someone who is very precise and writes the minimum
amount of music a scene requires – which he did very well in this film. In
fact, he’s also good at explaining what he does, and this is what he’s said
about working on Three Billboards:

Because there are so many fully-drawn [sic] characters in the story, I

considered an approach used by Ennio Morricone in his Spaghetti Western
Music Struc turing Narr ative – A Dialogue 197

scores (which I love) – giving each character a distinctive musical sig-

nature that stays with them even as their alliances shift. But ultimately
this seemed too arch, and some major characters, like Sam Rockwell’s,
simply don’t have any scored scenes until late in the f ilm. […] In the
end I concentrated on Mildred. There’s a soulful theme for Loss, which
motivates everything in the film. There’s a stomp-and-clap march when
she goes to War. And there’s a theme for Death, which is never far away.
As the story and the relationships develop, the themes intertwine until,
by the last couple of reels, they’re barely recognizable. (Burwell 2017)

IC: Burwell is clearly interested in how music conditions our responses,

not only to fiction but also to TV news. And he’s put a great discussion
between himself, Joel and Ethan Coen, and a neuroscientist, Aniruddh Patel,
online, which touches on the issue of temp music “nudging” scores toward
conformity (Burwell et al. 2013). But Patel also shows, quite graphically, by
means of neuroimaging, just how much of the brain is activated by purely
instrumental music, let alone when it’s part of the whole sensory input
that is a film. As he shows, music plays a major part in organizing spatial
awareness, emotions, anticipation and, in fact, the whole apparatus of
narrative. Well worth watching!

Notes

1. Robert Ziegler conducted Howard Shore’s score for The Hobbit: An Unex-
pected Journey (2012).
2. A new score for The Lodger was commissioned by the British Film In-
stitute from Joby Talbot in 1999, and widely performed by Robert Ziegler,
conducting the Matrix Ensemble. For Talbot’s reflections on the project, see
http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/composer/work/11838.
3. Bernstein had also previously collaborated with Scorsese on The Age of
Innocence (1993) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

References and Further Reading

Burwell, Carter. 2017. “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Carter’s Notes.” The Body.
Accessed March 13, 2018. http://www.carterburwell.com/projects/Three_Billboards.shtml.
Burwell, Carter, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Aniruddh Patel, and Alec Baldwin. 2013. “Art of the
Score.” YouTube video, 1:31:26. From a World Science Festival panel, moderated by Alec
198 Stories

Baldwin. November 21, 2013. Accessed March 13, 2018. http://www.carterburwell.com/main/

carter_burwell.shtml.
Christie, Ian, and David Thompson. 2003. Scorsese on Scorsese. 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber.
Liptak, Andrew. 2016. “The Marvel Symphonic Universe, at Every Frame a Painting.” The Verge,
September 12, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting.
Panofsky, Erwin. 1966. “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures.” In Film: An Anthology, edited
by Daniel Talbot, 21. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Richter Max. 2018. “On Composing the Score for Hostiles.” Awards Daily, January 4, 2018.
 Notes on Contributors

Vincent Amiel is Professor of Cinema Studies in the Sorbonne School of

the Arts at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris I, where he teaches film
aesthetics. He is the author of Le corps au cinéma (1998), Formes et obsessions
du cinéma américain contemporain (2004), Esthétique du montage (2017),
and Naissances d’images (2018).

Jan Baetens is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven. His

research deals mainly with contemporary writing (in French) and issues of
storytelling in minor genres, such as novelizations, comics, and photo novels.
Some recent books include: A voix haute. Poésie et lecture publique (2016) and
The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (coedited with Hugo Frey and
Steve Tabachnick 2018). He is also the author of some fifteen collections of
poetry, including Vivre sa vie. Une novellisation en vers du film de Jean-Luc
Godard (2006) and La lecture (in collaboration with the photographer Milan
Chlumsky 2017). In 2017, he also published a novel, Faire sécession, which
rewrites the history of the visual documentation of the American Civil War.

Dominique Chateau is Professor of Aesthetics and Cinema at the Sorbonne

School of the Arts at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris I. His books include
La question de la question de l’art (1994), Arts plastiques: Archéologie d’une
notion (1999), Qu’est-ce que l’art? (2000), Cinéma et philosophie (2003), Sartre
et le cinéma (2005), Esthétique du cinéma (2006), Introduzione all’estetica del
cinema (2007), Qu’est-ce qu’un artiste? (2008), Philosophie d’un art moderne:
Le cinéma (2009), and L’Art comptant pour un (2009).

Ian Christie is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College,

London University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written
and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, and Scorsese
and Gilliam, and has contributed to exhibitions ranging from Film as Film
(Hayward, 1979) to Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006) and
Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 (Royal Academy, 2017). In 2006, he was Slade
Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University, and is a past President of
Europa Cinemas. His books include The Last Machine: Early Cinema and
the Birth of the Modern World (1994), Gilliam on Gilliam (1999), A Matter
of Life and Death (2000), The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design
(2009), Audiences (2012), Doctor Zhivago (2015), and a forthcoming study of
the British pioneer, Robert Paul.
200 Stories

John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of

London. His books include Visible Fictions (1982), Seeing Things (2000), and
Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation (2011). Between 1982 and 1999,
he ran the independent TV company, Large Door Productions, making
documentaries for UK Channel 4 and BBC about cinema, TV, and wider
cultural issues. He is an editor of the online journal VIEW and Chair of
Learning on Screen. His ERC-funded ADAPT research project (2013-2018) on
the history of TV production technology is pioneering hands-on approaches
to television history.

Miklós Kiss is Assistant Professor in Film and Media studies at the University
of Groningen. His research intersects the fields of narrative and cognitive
film theories. Published in anthologies and academic journals (Projections,
Scope, Senses of Cinema, Necsus, New Cinemas), he serves on the editorial
board of [in]Transition, the first peer-reviewed academic journal of video­
graphic film studies. His recent books include Film Studies in Motion: From
Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video (with Thomas van den Berg
2016) and Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary
Complex Cinema (with Steven Willemsen 2017).

Eric de Kuyper is a filmmaker, novelist, and film scholar who, after having
written a doctoral dissertation in Paris under the supervision of A.J. Greimas,
founded the Institute of Film and Performing Arts at the University of
Nijmegen, and the film journal Versus. He was adjunct manager of the
Film Museum in Amsterdam and has directed the films Casta Diva (1982),
Naughty Boys (1984), A Strange Love Affair (1985), and My Life as
an Actor (2015). With Chantal Akerman, he worked on the script for La
captive (2000), which he later turned into a theater play, Les intermittences
du coeur. He adapted (with Céline Linssen) À la recherche du temps perdu
for Ro-Theatre, directed by Guy Cassiers, and wrote about Proust in Het
teruggevonden kind (2007).

Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at Panthéon-Sorbonne University,

Paris I, Senior member of Institut Universitaire de France, and has been
Deputy Director of the CNRS Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales since
2010. She has translated Stanley Cavell’s work into French and published
extensively on ordinary language philosophy, the American philosophical
tradition, ethics, gender, and politics, with two recent coauthored books
on democracy. Her Why We need Ordinary Language Philosophy appeared
in English in 2013. A columnist for Libération and other newspapers, often
Notes on Contributors 201

writing about television, she coedited a book on Buffy the Vampire Slayer
in 2014.

Luke McKernan is Lead Curator for News and the Moving Image at the
British Library in London. Previously, he was head of research at the British
Universities Film and Video Council and a cataloguer in the British Film
Institute’s National Film Archive. His Researcher’s Guide to Shakespeare on
Film, Television and Radio appeared in 2009, and his monograph Charles
Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925 in
2013. He continues to be a prolific blogger, with notable sites devoted to silent
film (The Bioscope), Shakespeare (Bardbox), Picturegoing and Theatregoing,
as well as writing on music, and comanaging the online directory Who’s
Who of Victorian Cinema.

José Moure is Professor of Cinema Studies and Dean of the School of the Arts
at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris I, where he teaches film aesthetics
and film analysis. He is the author of Vers une esthétique du vide au cinéma
(1997), Michelangelo Antonioni, cinéaste de l’évidement (2001), Le cinéma:
Naissance d’un art (with Daniel Banda 2008), Le cinéma: L’Art d’une civilisa-
tion (with Daniel Banda 2011), Avant le cinéma. L’œil et l’image (with Daniel
Banda 2012), Le plaisir du cinéma. Analyses et critiques des films (2012),
Charlot: Histoire d’un mythe (with Daniel Banda 2013), and coedited Screens
with Dominique Chateau in 2016.

Roger Odin is Emeritus Professor of Communication at the University of Paris

3, Sorbonne Nouvelle, where he was the head of the Film and Audiovisual
Institute from 1983 until 2003. Theorist of the semio-pragmatic approach
(De la fiction, 2000; Les espaces de communication, 2011), he directed an
international research group on film documentaries (L’âge d’or du cinéma
documentaire: Europe années 50, 2 vols, 1997) and has led research on amateur
film (appearing in Le film de famille, 1995; “Le cinéma en amateur,” Com-
munications no. 68, 1999). He is now particularly interested in mobile media:
“Il cinema nell’epoca del videofonino” (Bianco e Nero no. 568, 2011); Téléphone
mobile et création (with L. Allard et L. Creton 2014); Mobiles. Enjeux artistiques
et esthétiques (with L. Allard and L. Creton 2018).

Annie van den Oever is Extraordinary Professor for Film and Visual Media
at the University of the Free State, South Africa; Head of the Film Archive
and Media Archaeology Lab; Associate Professor of Film at the University
of Groningen; and Research Associate for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies
202 Stories

of the Institute ACTE – UMRS CNRS, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris

I. She is series editor of The Key Debates and editor of NECSUS. European
Journal of Media Studies. Her most recent book publications include: Life
Itself (2008); Ostrannenie (2010); Sensitizing the Viewer (2011); De geboorte van
Boontje (with Ernst Bruinsma and Bart Nuyens 2012); Technē/Technology
(2014); and Exposing the Film Apparatus: The Film Archive as a Research Lab
(ed. with Giovanna Fossati 2016). She initiated the book series Sleutelteksten
in Film- en Mediatheorie (Key Texts in Film and Media Theory).

Melanie Schiller is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Popular Music

at the University of Groningen. Her doctoral research at the Amsterdam
School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam focused
on popular music and postwar-Germanness, published as Soundtracking
Germany: Popular Music and National Identity (2018). Postdoctoral research
on popular music and national identifications in the context of a European
integration project was carried out as a Bernadotte Research Fellow at
the Royal Swedish Gustav Aldolfs Academy for Folk Culture. Her research
interests include popular music and postwar German national identity;
Schlager, Kraftwerk, beat, and electronic music; European pop and national-
ism; contemporary audiovisual culture, mediality and transmediality; and
comparative arts.

Steven Willemsen is Lecturer in Film and Media studies at the University

of Groningen. He was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Research Cen-
tre for Literature and the Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara
(2016-2017). He is author of Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach
to Contemporary Complex Cinema (with Miklós Kiss 2017); and coeditor of
the book series Sleutelteksten in Film- en Mediatheorie (Key Texts in Film
and Media Theory). The title of his doctoral dissertation is The Cognitive
and Hermeneutic Dysnamic of Complex Film Narratives (2018). His research
interests lie in film theory, narratology, cognitive approaches to the arts
and aesthetics, and experiences of narrative complexity in film.

Robert Ziegler combines guest-conducting major orchestras in concerts

throughout Europe and the Far East, with extensive work in film music.
He has commissioned new accompaniments for silent films with his own
Matrix Ensemble, revived classical scores in concert performance, and
conducts soundtracks for a variety of leading contemporary film composers,
including Jonny Greenwood, Howard Shore, Max Richter, Mark Isham, and
Michael Giacchino.
 Index of Names
Abbott, Paul 159 Caldwell, John 161
Ackroyd, Peter 188 Cameron, Allan 55
Akerman, Chantal 20, 175-177, 180 Campora, Matthew 55
Alber, Jan 59 Carroll, Noël 94
Allen, Robert C. 184 Cassiers, Guy 175
Amengual, Barthélemy 111 Cavell, Stanley 19, 143-145, 147
Amiel, Vincent 16, 45 Chabon, Michael 38
Anderson, Paul Thomas 193-194 Chateau, Dominique 13, 18, 119, 129
Ang, Ien 60 Christie, Ian 11, 85, 92, 181, 193, 196
Antonioni, Michelangelo 18, 111, 113-114, 117-118 Clark, Brian 104
Arendt, Hannah 12 Clarke, Mary Cowden 188
Aronson, Elliot 70 Clark, Krissy 85
Artaud, Antonin 121 Clouzot, Henri-Georges 177
Auerbach, Erich 28 Clowes, Daniel 39
Austen, Jane 188 Coëgnarts, Maarten 56
Averty, Jean-Christophe 47 Coen brothers, the (Joel and Ethan) 196-197
Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) 180
Baetens, Jan 16, 27-28, 33 Collins, Jim 31
Balzac, Honoré de 181 Conrad, Joseph 180
Barker, Martin 88 Coppola, Francis Ford 104
Baroni, Raphaël 28 Cortázar, Julio 75
Barraza, J.A. 86 Crawford, Matthew 89
Barthes, Roland 27, 45, 88, 101 Crofts, Stephen 88
Bazin, André 167 Crucifix, Benoît 39
Beaty, Bart 33 Crumb, Robert 39
Bellour, Raymond 88 Cukor, George 178
Benioff, David 150
Benjamin, Walter 12-13, 103 Damasio, Antonio 11
Ben Shaul, Nitzan 57 Darwin, Charles 90
Bergougnoux, Pierre 50 Davies, Jim 70
Bernardo, Nuno 98, 104 Deci, Edward L. 78
Bernstein, Elmer 195-196 Deleuze, Gilles 120-121
Bertetti, P. 101 Delvaux, André 175
Bochco, Stephen 159 Desplechin, Arnaud 51
Boillat, Alain 39 Deuze, Mark 99
Bolter, Jay David 27 Dickens, Charles 21, 181-183, 186-188, 190
Bonitzer, Pascal 111, 118 Dickie, George 121
Bonner, Francis 157 Dick, Philip K. 182
Bordwell, David 17, 61, 91, 93-94, 160 Donald, Merlin 71
Borges, Jorge Luis 76 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 180
Boyd, Brian 17, 90-91 Douglas, Susan J. 155
Braque, Georges 169 Dowell, Ben 186-187
Bresson, Robert 180 Dozo, Björn-Olav 39
Brough, Melissa M. 104 Dunham, Lena 147
Brouillette, Sarah 37 Duras, Marguerite 120, 177, 180
Browne, Nick 88
Brummitt, Cassie 103 Eco, Umberto 68, 75, 88
Buckland, Warren 55, 67-68 Eikhenbaum, Boris 88
Buñuel, Luis 132, 136 Eisenstein, Sergei 92, 121
Burke, Edmund 137 Eisner, Will 32, 38
Burrell, Ian 186, 190 Elberse, Anita 100-101
Burwell, Carter 21-22, 196-197 Elfman, Danny 194
Buss, Robert William 185 Ellis, John 19, 155, 159, 162
Byron, Glennis 120 Elsaesser, Thomas 55
204 Stories

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 143 Jackson, Peter 194

Escher, Maurits Cornelis 74, 176 James, William 51
Jenkins, Henry 38, 97-101, 103-104
Falk, Ruma 73-75 Jenny, Laurent 169
Faurholt, Gry 125-126 Jones, Duncan 67
Faye, Jean-Pierre 28 Jonze, Spike 75-76
Festinger, Leon 70 Jordan, Tony 21, 183-184, 187-190
Figgis, Mike 161 Jost, François 88, 129
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 149 Juul, Jesper 68-69
Fleming, Laura 104
Fontaine, Jean de la 179 Kalogeras, Stavroula 104
Ford, John 51, 162 Kant, Immanuel 121, 134
Forster, Marc 75 Kaufman, Charlie 75-76
Fowler, Matt 18, 119 Keats, John 60
Francastel, Pierre 45 Kelley, David E. 159
Frank, Joseph 35 Kiss, Miklós 15-17, 55-57, 62, 70, 74
Frears, Stephen 180 Klecker, Cornelia 55
Freeman, Matthew 101, 105 Knights, L.C. 187
Freud, Sigmund 123, 128, 136 Korthals Altes, Liesbeth 61, 89
Frey, Hugo 33 Krauss, Rosalind 28
Fusar-Poli, Paolo 76 Kruglanski, Arie W. 60
Kustritz, A.M. 102-103
Gambarato, R.R. 98-99 Kuyper, Erik de 20-21, 175-176
Gance, Abel 47
Geertz, Clifford 12 Laugier, Sandra 18-19, 143
Genette, Gérard 76, 88, 120 Lefebvre, Martin 13
Geraghty, Christine 190 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 27
Gerard, Harold B. 70 Lindgren Leavenworth, Maria 101
Gibbons, Dave 31 Linssen, Céline 175
Gibson, Mel 28 Liptak, Andrew 194
Gitlin, Todd 159 Lomax, Alan 196
Godard, Jean-Luc 48 Lynch, David 18, 72, 120-125, 127-129, 132, 135-137
Gottschalk, Simon 67-68
Greenberg, Clement 28 Mack, Max 178
Greenwald, Andy 151 Manovich, Lev 28, 169
Greenwood, Jonny 193-194 Maor, Eli 72
Grodal, Torben 17, 91 Martin, George R.R. 143, 147-148, 151, 188
Grusin, Richard 27 Martinson, Jane 186
Guynes, Sean 103-104 Marx, William 31
Mascagni, Pietro 193
Hakemulder, Frank 89 Mathewson, Grover C. 70
Hall, Stuart 101 McCloud, Scott 39
Hassler-Forest, Dan 103-104 McDonagh, Martin 196
Hatfield, Charles 38 McKernan, Luke 21, 182-183
Hawks, Howard 162 McTaggart, Allister 137
Hayles, N. Katherine 28 Meister, Jan Christoph 76
Haynes, Todd 179-180 Menary. Richard 62
Henderson, Lesley 159 Metz, Christian 12-14, 88, 120
Herman, David 22, 88-89 Miller, Frank 31
Herrmann, Bernard 193-195 Mills, Judson 70
Hesmondalgh, David 38 Mitchell, W.J.T. 35
Heusden, Barend van 71 Mittell, Jason 14-15, 55, 67-68, 78, 101-102, 104,
Highsmith, Patricia 179 159
Hills, Matt 103 Moloney, Kevin T. 104
Hitchcock, Alfred 47-48, 51, 193, 195 Molotiu, Andrei 28, 35
Montaigne, Michel de 148
Iampolski, Mikhail 122 Moore, Alan 31
Morin, Edgar 124
Morricone, Ennio 196
Index of Names 205

Moseley, Rachel 158 Ryan, Marie-Laure 99-101, 104

Mougin, Jean-Paul 32-33 Ryan, Richard M. 78
Moure, José 18, 111
Mulvey, Laura 14, 137, 160 Sabin, Roger 39
Mungioli, M.C. 99 Saint-Saëns, Camille 193
Murray, Simone 37 Salmon, Christian 28
Schapiro, Meyer 45-46
Nerval, Gérard de (Gérard Labrunie) 136 Schattschneider, Doris 74
Newman, Oscar 149 Schiffrin, André 36
Schiller, Melanie 17, 97
Odin, Roger 20, 167 Schlöndorff, Volker 176
Oever, Annie van den 11, 137-138, 155, 175 Schneider, Greice 35
Oliver, Mary Beth 77 Schneider, Steven Jay 137
Ollier, Claude 115 Scolari, Carlos Alberto 99, 101, 104
Scorsese, Martin 193, 195-196
Panek, Elliot 55, 58, 67-68 Semova, Dimitrina 104
Panofsky, Erwin 195 Severi, Carlo 45, 50
Parajanov, Sergei 52 Shakespeare, William 21, 181-182
Pastoureau, Michel 135 Shirky, Clay 89
Patel, Aniruddh 197 Shklovsky, Viktor 88, 137
Pedri, Nancy 39 Shore, Howard 194, 196
Pence, Harry E. 104 Shresthova, Sangita 104
Penderecki, Krzysztof 135 Simon, David 149
Penrose, Lionel and Roger 72 Simons, Jan 55
Perec, Georges 167 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 176, 179
Perkins, Anthony 47 Slors, Marc 62
Pernía Peñalver, Noé Orlando 104 Smith, Christopher 72
Peters, Tom 55 Smith, Tim J. 91
Picasso, Pablo 169 Smollett, Tobias 189
Pier, John 15 Spiegelman, Art 31, 35, 39
Pinter, Harold 176 Spierig brothers, the (Michael and Peter) 72
Pizzino, Christopher 34 Staiger, Janet 55, 160
Polanski, Roman 72 Sternberg, Joseph von 162
Potter, Dennis 17, 102-103, 159 Sterne, Laurence 189
Powell, Anthony 181 Stevenson, R.L. 33
Pritchett, V.S. 189-190 Straubs, the (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle
Propp, Vladimir 88, 104 Huillet) 120
Proust, Marcel 20-21, 175-177, 179, 181 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen 120
Punter, David 120
Tamborini, Ron 77
Rachmaninov, Sergei 178 Tan, Ed S. 91
Ramsaye, Terry 90 Tarantino, Quentin 193
Raney, Arthur A. 77 Tarkovsky, Andrei 52
Redvall, E.N. 159 Tennant, Emma 188
Remnick, David 161 Thomas, Bronwen 101
Renouard, Caroline 47 Thompson, David 196
Rhys, Jean 188 Thompson, John B. 36
Ricardou, Jean 28 Thon, Jan-Noël 99-100
Rice, Anne 188 Thoreau, Henry David 143
Richardson, Samuel 189 Todorov, Tzvetan 88
Richter, Max 196 Tolstoy, Leo 13
Ricoeur, Paul 49-51, 169 Truffaut, François 51
Rohmer, Eric 47-48 Tsivian, Yuri 122
Rose, Olivia 88 Tsur, Reuven 60
Rossellini, Roberto 178
Ros, Vincent 56 Vassilieva, Julia 92
Rowling, J.K. 103, 188 Veglis, Andreas 104
Ruiz, Raoul 176 Vertov, Dziga 122
Russell, James 102 Veuve, Jacqueline 179
206 Stories

Vigalondo, Nacho 72 Willemsen, Steven 15-17, 55-57, 62, 70, 74

Visconti, Luchino 176 Winnicott, D.W. 20, 170
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 146
Wachowskis, the (Lilly and Lana Wachowski) Wolk, Douglas 36
97 Wollen, Peter 88
Wasicsko, Nick 149 Wood, Helen 158
Webster, Donna M. 60
Weishaar, Schuy R. 137 Yapo, Mennan 65
Weiss, D.B. 150
Welles, Orson 193 Zak, Paul 85-86
Wenders, Wim 52 Zhou, Tony 194
Wheatley, Helen 158 Ziegler, Robert 21, 193
 Index of Film Titles
24 148, 150 Girls 143, 147
Gone Girl 148
Adaptation 15, 67, 75-76 Great British Bake off, The 155
Amiche, Le 114 Grey’s Anatomy 161
Andere film, De 175 Grido, Il 112-114
Anglaise et le Duc, L’ 47
Arrival 56 Happy Valley 160
Avventura, L’ 112-114 Harry Potter 17, 97, 102
Heroes 98
Back to the Future Part II 65 Hill Street Blues 159
Batman 31, 101 Hostiles 196
Being John Malkovich 77 Hotel Monterey 179
Big Brother 155 Hustle 183
Black Mirror 182
Black Panther 103 Identificazione di una donna 18, 111, 113-114
Blow Up 112-114 I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here 156
Breaking Bad 143 Inception 15, 176
Buffy the Vampire Slayer 147
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080
Cape Fear 195 Bruxelles 21, 175, 178
Captive, La 20-21, 175-179
Chéri 180 L.A. Confidential 91, 148
Chinatown 91 Life on Mars 21, 183
Cronaca di un amore 18, 111-113 Lincoln 148
Crown, The 161 Lodger, The 195
Lord of the Rings, The 194
Dancing with the Stars 156 Lost 72, 98, 152
Deadwood 151 Lost Highway 72
Deserto rosso, Il 112-114
Dickensian 21, 181-183, 185-190 Mad Men 143
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Man with a Movie Camera 122
136 Masterchef 156
Doctor Who 101 Matrix, The 15, 17, 97
Donnie Darko 57 Memento 15, 67
Dragnet 101 Mickey Mouse 101
Miraq 64
EastEnders 21, 184, 190 Modern Family 162
Eclipse, The 112-114 Mulholland Drive 15, 56-57, 59, 64
Electric Dreams 182 My Life as an Actor 175
Enemy 59
Entourage 143 Napoléon 47
ER 19, 145 Naughty Boys 175
Est, D’ 179 News from Home 179
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind No Offence 159
15, 67 Notte, La 112-114
Exterminating Angel, The 132 NYPD Blue 159, 161

Family Feud 156 Passenger, The 112-114

Fantômes d’Ismael, Les 51 Phantom Thread 194
Femme douce, Une 180 Premonition 65
Friends 163 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies 185
Primer 56, 64
Game of Thrones 18, 97, 143, 145-146, 148, 150 Prisonnière, La 177
Gangs of New York 196 Psycho 47, 51
General Line 121 Pulp Fiction 15, 67, 160
208 Stories

Raging Bull 196 Taxi Driver 193

Reality 64, 73-74 Temps retrouvé, Le 176
Tenant, The 72, 74
Saute ma ville 175 There Will Be Blood 194
Searchers, The 51 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
Secret Life of Books, The 184 Missouri 22, 196
Sex and the City 143, 147 Timecrimes 64-65, 72
Shameless 159 Titanic 148
Show Me a Hero 149 Tokyo-Ga 52
Signora senza camelie, La 114 Triangle 56, 64, 72, 74
Six Feet Under 143 True Detective 148
Sixth Sense, The 15, 67, 148 Twilight Zone, The 182
Sopranos, The 143 Twin Peaks 18, 119-132, 135, 137
Source Code 67
Star Is Born, A 178 Usual Suspects, The 15, 67
Star Trek 101
Star Wars 97, 103, 126 Walking Dead, The 19, 150
Rogue One 103 West Wing, The 19, 145
The Force Awakens 103 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 155
State of Play 159 Wild at Heart 15
Stranger Than Fiction 75 Wire, The 143, 149
Strictly Come Dancing 156
Sud 179 X-Factor 155
Swann in Love 176
Swingers 148 Zabriskie Point 112, 114
Synecdoche, New York 73-74 Zweimal gelebt 178
Titles Published in This Series

Ostrannenie. 2010. Annie van den Oever (ed.)

Subjectivity. 2011. Dominique Chateau (ed.)
Audiences. 2012. Ian Christie (ed.)
Technē/Technology. 2014. Annie van den Oever (ed.)
Feminisms. 2015. Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers (eds.)
Screens. 2016. Dominique Chateau and José Moure (eds.)
Stories. 2018. Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever (eds.)

Forthcoming Titles in This series

Post-Cinema
Emotions

Academic Advisory Board

Francesco Casetti
Laurent Creton
Jane Gaines
Frank Kessler
András Bálint Kovács
Eric de Kuyper
Laura Mulvey
Roger Odin
Patricia Pisters
Emile Poppe
Pere Salabert
Heide Schlupmann
Vivian Sobchack
Janet Staiger