Ed O'Neill comments: > On the "narrative flaws" in _Saving Private Ryan_, I think > the logical coherence of Hollywood film is often > over-emphasized. General audiences are quite a bit more > flexible in what they expect than devoted fans and even > scholars. Those in the latter group tend to want to > construct rules and theories, while the general audience > often doesn't care. > > And filmmakers, of course, will do whatever they think will > elicit a strong response, narrative logic be damned. > > After all, _All About Eve_ switches narrators, _Sunset > Boulevard_ is narrated by a dead man, and _Brief Encounter_ > includes a scene at which the female narrator is not > present: presumably no one ran screaming from the theaters > clutching their heads in total incomprehension. Even _The > Usual Suspects_ was just a joyride, as far as most audiences > seemed to be concerned. A very good observation, but I think further distinctions need to be made and they need to be placed within personal and historical contexts that are beyond my powers to attempt right now. Briefly, I'd agree that narrative coherence has only the importance that filmmakers, critics and audiences want it to have--to varying degrees. For example, having a first-person narration that provides information that the teller could not directly know is a long-established convention: CITIZEN KANE does it; so does TITANIC. On the other hand, I think that some screenwriters and directors have obsessed more about narrative logic than others, and I suspect that such obsession has been more typical of a bygone era that was governed by formalist norms of the work of art as unified whole, a set of norms that hasn't disappeared but that was considerably weakened by the onset of postmodernism. Some of the more famous, if apocryphal, debates about the nature of film art have dealt with issues such as whether a scene taken from inside a fireplace won't make the audience imagine that it's about to go up in flames! Finally, there are those directors (and writers too) who like to tweak the conventions and play with the norms. SUNSET BOULEVARD is a good example of a writer-director who loved to do that kind of thing. Don Larsson ---------------------- Donald Larsson Minnesota State U, Mankato [log in to unmask] ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/screensite