SCREEN-L Archives

September 1995, Week 1

SCREEN-L@LISTSERV.UA.EDU

Options: Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Michael Saenz <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 6 Sep 1995 19:29:56 -0500
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (79 lines)
Discussion so far has centered on films, but I think the unreliable
narrator is a comparatively frequent fixture on television. The decisive
aspect of unreliable narration, after all, is a sudden exposure of the
taken-for-granted rules of the diegetic world, rules which retrospectively
prove to be mistaken or inadequate. Previously accepted chains of
cause-and-effect, unproblematically recognized agents, even assumed spatial
and temporal relationships may suddenly be up for reconsideration.
Television promotes ambiguities in all these constructed identities, to the
degree that its structure as a series of episodes requires continual
revisitation and reconstruction of a presumedly, but never wholly,
continuous diegesis. Many action-adventure shows and situation comedies,
especially if they become popular, have special, celebratory episodes in
which the usual rules are suspended, and "normally" impossible situations
or relationships are explored. (I'm thinking, for example, of THE DICK VAN
DYKE SHOW episode which ended by suggesting that all Rob's friends were
really aliens with eyes in the back of their heads.) The discontinuity
between episodes--even between segments on different sides of a
commercial--provides a recurrent formal occasion for such narrational
unreliability. (Of course, some shows "do" more with this unreliability,
while most--LAW AND ORDER, say--try to contain unreliability.)
 
It seems to me that the question of a narrator's reliability is also
related to viewers' conventional expectations, and thus to genre. Generic
recombination may intensify the reliability of the narrator through a kind
of narrative "overdetermination" (as in Mel Brooks' comedy), but, when
different kinds of generic logic overlap and interact, it may also unseat
usual generic certainties about the nature of the diegetic world (as on X
FILES). Television, as a medium especially susceptible to generic
recombination, invites considerable unreliability of this kind. (This
emphasizes, as does Booth, that unreliabile narrators, like any other
narrators, are constructions, implied authors. In the case of genre,
viewers' expectations become active components, not just in the diegetic,
but in the constitution of the narrator.)
 
The most aggressive unrealiable narrator from television that I know is
that of TWIN PEAKS. On that show, different theories of causality, and the
forces on behalf of which different characters are acting, are casually
intermixed, complicated, even contradicted from one moment to the next.
(Remember Kyle McLaghlan's FBI agent, presumably the harbinger of
scienctific law and order, becoming a zen dart-thrower to decide among
possible mystery solutions? This alongside story lines right out of Peyton
Place and Nightmare on Elm Street.) In fact, I think the show's
diminishment in popularity and critical interest was precisely due to such
narrational unreliability, which began to seem random, rather than
suggestive and revelatory.
 
Northern Exposure is a program in which the logic of coincidence and cause
and effect are routinely and pleasurably disfigured too, and the viewer is
thus invited to expect an expanded range of possiblities whose limits are
not entirely clear. The unreliability here is sunny, not pathological as on
Twin Peaks. (Perhaps one would say that the sunniness or the pathology they
show are reliabilities. Does this, then, in Booth's classification, make
individual episodes wholly reliable? I don't think so. Instead, it asks one
to consider what degrees or dimensions of unreliability can be posited.)
 
Another Falsey and Brand show, ST. ELSEWHERE, made much of discovered
allegorical details, which lent an unexpected, retrospectively revelatory,
almost magical realist dimension to events.
 
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.)
 
Writing these comments (I'm spurred on because these are arguments I make
in my undergrad TV crit classes) makes me realize that, for me, the
unreliable narrator is frequently tied to metaphysical irony. Does this
make sense to others? Does anyone know any other "uses" for unreliable
narration?
 
----
To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L
in the message.  Problems?  Contact [log in to unmask]

ATOM RSS1 RSS2