Drew, Clearly, I've not explained myself properly. I shall now attempt to do so. "The Usual Suspects, Fight Club and Sixth Sense involve explanations that "cheat" ??? C'mon: That's just ... wrong." (snip) First, I wanted to let Jane Mills know (because I thought it might be of some tangential interest to her) that the script for 'Adaptation' contains a pretty pointed criticism of movies that establish a particular world, a set of premisses, a mode of narrative/dramatic coding, and do not violate the contract thereby made with the audience until the last ten minutes or so of screen time. Then they introduce a new element which undercuts everything that has gone before, and cuts it off at the foundations. In 'Fight Club' this is the revelation that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are different/separate aspects of the same personality who inhabit the same body. The movie just tells you that this is so - it doesn't give you time to think back over everything you have seen before & thought you understood. It doesn't allow you to think about why it has to be that way. And I do not think the film ever gives the audience any of the tools it might need to think about these two stars as 'one person.' Similarly, in 'The Sixth Sense', the film establishes that the dead people Haley Joel Osment sees are pallid & throw up everywhere. But Bruce Willis is exempted, and instead of explaining why, the film rather patronizingly assumes or forces our consent. ('The Others' is even more coercive in this regard.) In all these respects the dice are loaded: the film holds all the cards. Ok, 'cheat' is too compressed a word for what I am getting at, but what you say here, Drew, about sums it up. " "cheating" suggests these films employ total contrivances, inconsistent with the whole filmic structure (when understood in their entirety), or inventions out of left field, to resolve themselves." (snip) "Told in another way, or from another perspective, but with all the narrative and formal properties exactly intact - absolutely nothing added or subtracted - and these narrative would be as straightforward as anything else on the screen. No one would have any trouble following every nuance." I'm afraid I don't understand at all how one can ever tell a story 'another way' and at the same time maintain 'all the narrative and formal properties exactly intact.' However, that is the kind of false reasoning that films like 'The Usual Suspects' trade in. The final revelation spells it out that Spacey's character is a wilfully unreliable narrator. Once you take that on board, I don't think you can believe in or rely on anything else in the entire movie. So we are left with a story that while it was playing was intriguing and coherent, but in retrospect, completely untruthful: this goes completely against what we feel about the reality (or plausibility, if you prefer) of what's depicted on film. That's not the problem: the problem is that in return for giving up our illusions the film gives us - nothing (except maybe that Kevin Spacey is shifty, and we knew that already.) Hence the temptation to go away and 'reconstruct' a classical narrative from 'Suspects', 'Memento' and the like. But the fact is, nothing in a film, or any other fiction for that matter, can exist in any other form than the one we have. It could not happen another way without becoming also a different object. I do know that many people feel the exact opposite about these kinds of movies. But to return to the original point of this thread, I agree with Jane Mills that such movies are 'incomprehensible', because there is nothing we are invited or permitted to comprehend. Laura Carroll English Program La Trobe University Melbourne Australia _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite