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September 1995, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
Donald Larsson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 7 Sep 1995 13:01:04 -0600
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Michael Saenz suggests:
"And then, of course, there is any anthology show, which brings diverse
narrations together under some rough rubric--an institutionalized
unreliable narrator, whose unreliability serves a central commodity: the
novelty of each new week. Perhaps individual episodes of such shows are too
discontinuous to talk about a single narrator--though there was always
Alfred Hitchcock or Dick Powell striving to offer tongue-in-cheek
(unreliable?) continuity. (Talk of the anthology raises the example of a
show whose individual episodes displayed heroically perverse unreliable
narrators--THE TWILIGHT ZONE.)"
 
Hitchcock's show is an interesting case in point.  He only directed some twenty
episodes himself, but his framing commentaries could bring different
 implications
to the night's story.  Quite often, the episode might end with the triumph of
a killer or other criminal (sometimes quite a likable one), but in the closing
comments, Hitchcock would assure us that the person had been eventually caught
or otherwise punished for his or her crime.  Now this, of course, satisfied the
sensibility of network censors, but it was delivered so drily and tongue-in-
cheek that "reliability" was not even a question for most viewers.
 
 
Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
 
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