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The non-linear film is a voice-oriented genre. As it tends to be quite open-ended in its characteristics, we devote this entire chapter to the form. In the years since Pulp Fiction debuted, the non-linear film has grown enormously in its influence, and its importance has been paralleled by the development of non-linear editing and of computer applications in special effects, animation, and video games. The latter technological developments have made more appealing the open-ended quality of the non-linear film. Beyond Pulp Fiction, important non-linear films include Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, and Karen and Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing . The open-ended quality of these films moves us away from their characters toward the voice of their writers.
The non-linear film is not a Quentin Tarantino creation. As early as 1929, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí made Un Chien Andalou, the first non-linear film. That film, with its fragmented narrative, its leaps into fantasy, its shock juxtapositions, and its lack of narrative progression, provided an excellent vehicle for Buñuel and Dalí to voice their views on dreams, the Church, the Bourgeoisie, art, society, and anti-narrative narrative, leaving Un Chien Andalou open to various interpretations.
Also important in the evolution of the non-linear film is the work of Jean-Luc Godard. Since 1959, Godard has been using familiar genres—the gangster film, the war film, the melodrama, and the musical—as his narrative base. But in each case Godard subverts our genre expectations to voice his views on war, society, and capitalism and to polemicize for change.
What is important about both Buñuel and Godard is that they subverted plot and character in the same way contemporary non-linear storytellers do. Their work provides the models for non-linear storytelling. In order to understand the non-linear story fully, it’s useful at this point to review linear storytelling, the analogue to the non-linear story.
Linear Storytelling
The linear narrative represents the commercial mid-point of storytelling. The experimental film and the documentary are at one edge of the mainstream and the docudrama, the fable, the experimental narrative, and the non-linear film are at the opposite edge. Underlying the experience of the linear narrative is the invitation for the viewer to identify with the main character. Whether the main character is a hero or a victim, the identification positions the viewer into a state that essentially renders the viewer passive. In that dream state, the viewer will not face choices but rather will move from the critical moment that opens the story to the resolution that in effect closes the story. Through a rising action, the viewer experiences the barriers, the challenges, and the eventual positive or negative resolution. The arc is predetermined and follows story form expectations. In this sense, the linear narrative is a safe experience, where the viewer makes no choice. Satisfaction, excitement, and the range of feeling depend on identification, and the predictability of the story form assures an exciting but safe arc of experience. Central to the experience of the linear narrative is that the viewer doesn’t need to exercise choice (as opposed to the non-linear narrative).
The linear narrative also proceeds within established story form norms, within genres. Mainstream genres—the melodrama, the police story, the gangster film, film noir, situation comedy, romantic comedy, and the thriller—have established dramatic arcs known to the audience. For example, the romantic comedy will proceed along the arc of a relationship. Boy meets girl, or girl meets boy or boy meets boy kicks off the narrative. Because the film is a comedy, the narrative will have a positive outcome. The Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something about Mary and Richard Curtis’ Four Weddings and a Funeral exemplify this genre. In the thriller, an ordinary person finds himself/herself in extraordinary circumstances. If he doesn’t figure out who is pursuing him, he will die. The dramatic arc of the thriller is essentially a chase. Ernest Lehman’s North by Northwest and Erin Krueger’s Arlington Road exemplify the thriller. The dramatic arc of the police story is crime–investigation–solution. The dramatic arc of the gangster film follows the rise and fall of the gangster. The dramatic arc of the science fiction film follows the technology vs. humanity struggle. The audience, when it chooses a particular story form, knows how that experience will proceed. This is one of the strengths of the linear film. But as stated earlier, the key to the effectiveness of the linear film is the identification with the main character.
Whether the main character is an outsider or a professional (e.g., policeman), the writer will use particular strategies to enhance identification. First, the main character will have a goal, which he or she will pursue with vigor. Second, if the character is potentially victimized by an antagonist or by the structure of the plot, we will identify with that character. In real life, none of us likes to be victimized—so too in the film experience. And so we identify with the potential victim, the main character. The writer can also deploy other strategies, such as giving the main character a confessional private moment or, at the other extreme, a tragic flaw (such as overabundant ambition, as in Macbeth, or overabundant aggression, as seen in Jake La Motta in Raging Bull). Whatever the strategy or strategies employed, the identification with the main character will carry the audience through the dramatic arc to its resolution and by doing so the experience of the viewer will be whole and predetermined. This is both the strength and the weakness of the linear narrative for the viewer. In its predictability, there is no room for the viewer to exercise choice, to be more active or participatory, precisely the options the non-linear narrative affords the viewer.
The Non-Linear Narrative
To understand the properties of the non-linear story, it is best to consider them in light of the linear narrative. In terms of character, the nonlinear story has multiple main characters rather than a single goal-directed main character. As the characters in the non-linear film may or may not have a goal, they do not necessarily proceed along a clear dramatic arc, as is the case in the linear narrative. An example will make the point: In Anderson’s Magnolia (1998), there are eight characters who occupy the space of the main character. They group into three families and include at least one additional character, a policeman, who becomes emotionally involved with the daughter in one of those families. Some of the characters have a goal—a young boy ostensibly wants to win a television show competition (or does he?), two dying fathers want to reunite with their alienated son or daughter, a policeman wants to do his job effectively and in a humane fashion. The other characters do not have clear goals but rather find themselves in situations where they must make a decision. All eight characters seem to find themselves in a life crisis, disappointed in parents or not wishing to disappoint parents. This state of being is what the characters share, and if there is a dramatic shape to the story, it is to pose the question: What will each do and what will be the consequences of their actions?
In Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1995), a group of six characters is brought together in a place, a sex club. These characters are as despairing as Anderson’s characters are. Their goals, however, are far more submerged or absent than is depicted in the Anderson film. More apparent are the goals of the characters in Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1997). They are soldiers fighting on the American side in World War II. The battle is for the island of Guadalcanal, and their goals are principally to survive; although their Colonel has another goal, to use the outcome of the battle to achieve the promotion that has so long eluded him.
Key in the consideration of character in the non-linear film is that there will be multiple characters and that they may or may not have a goal. The consequence is that the viewer is observing character, rather than identifying with a character and moving with that character through a dramatic arc.
Turning to the issue of plot, there may or may not be a plot in the nonlinear narrative. There is a plot in The Thin Red Line: the progress of the war in the battle for Guadalcanal. In the linear film, plot works against the goal of the main character. As there are multiple main characters in The Thin Red Line, we do not follow how a single character reacts against the pressure of plot. Consequently, the use of plot is muted. For the Colonel, the progress of the battle is an opportunity rather than a threat. But most of the soldiers seem indifferent to the progress of the battle. For one soldier who finds a tearful, terrified enemy in an overrun village, the progress of the battle reminds him of his own sorrow and pain, which he feels, rather than feeling empowered by victory. Because of the multiple and varied responses to the progress of the battle, plot is compromised as a dramatic device and consequently it is relegated to background rather than serving as the powerful narrative tool it can be in a linear film such as Paths of Glory . Similarly, the fact that there are multiple main characters in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust blunts the impact of the plot—the momentous day when a portion of the family will migrate from an island off of South Carolina to the mainland, principally the industrial Midwest of the United States.
Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) offers a variation on the use of plot in three interconnected stories. There is plot in all three stories, each having to do with the professional activities of the main characters—killing off threats to the economic well-being of the gang. The middle story differs, as the main character is a boxer who fails to throw a fight; he both benefits and may suffer the consequences. Will he get away with it? Here plot operates as it does in a linear narrative, and it is quite effective. In the two stories that flank the middle story, however, plot proceeds as background, as it does in the other non-linear films described. In many non-linear films, including Egoyan’s Exotica and Anderson’s Magnolia, the plot element is so remote as to be de facto nonexistent. At best, it functions as background, but more often not even that. Most important is that the use of plot in the non-linear film rarely proceeds as it does in the linear film. It is simply not a vital narrative device.
The greatest consequence of this use of plot is to flatten the dramatic arc of the non-linear film. A war film such as The Thin Red Line changes from a progression from the beginning of a battle to its end, to a series of situations that may or may not be directly linked to the progress of the battle. The sense of time, so dramatically central to a linear war film such as Apocalypse Now, is totally different from the progression in The Thin Red Line. Chronological time is no longer critical. The same can be said for cause and effect. There is a randomness to the experience of the non-linear film. As a result, there is no dramatic arc. In its stead, we have a series of scenes or situations that are explored. The organization of those scenes will not necessarily be progressively linked. Consequently, our involvement will come from character rather than from plot, from the intensity of the individual scene rather than from the organization of progressive scenes. This puts much more emphasis on exploration than on exposition, on feeling and mood rather than on external events. The absence of the dramatic arc has far-reaching consequences for the writing of the non-linear film, an issue we will return to at the end of this chapter. For now, it poses this question: If there is no dramatic arc, what is the organizing principle of the structure of the non-linear film?
The first noticeable quality of the structure of the non-linear film is its elusiveness. It doesn’t look like the clear structure of the linear film. But there is despite this a structure. That structure may be more shaping device than structure in the conventional sense of the word. The structure of Pulp Fiction might even be considered a counter-structure. The same characters appear in the three stories, but Tarantino has altered their chronology. Like a clock, we come back to the beginning of every 24 hours. In Tarantino’s story, we come back to the beginning at the end (and go past that beginning hour!). Within the clock counter-structure, the three stories proceed out of sequence. There are, however, common characters in each story; primarily Marcellus is the inner circle of structure in Pulp Fiction.
The shaping device or loose structure in Malick’s The Thin Red Line is the battle for Guadalcanal. There is lip service to chronology, but Malick chooses incidents and emphases that have little to do with that progression. Within this larger structure, the focus on a single platoon helps provide the inner shape Malick works with. The shaping device in Dash’s Daughters of the Dust also references chronology, the day of migration for the Peazant family to leave Ebo Landing, an island off of South Carolina. Even Anderson pays lip service to chronology. Two fathers are dying, and they want to reconcile with their alienated children. Time is also a presence in the stories of the aging child star and the contemporary child “star” making his reputation in a TV quiz show. The inner core issues for all these characters, however, does not relate to time. It is their common condition—despair, ennui, a condition that does not relate to time but rather to inner life.
Place, rather than time, becomes the shaping event in Egoyan’s Exotica. The sex club is the meeting place for the characters, but it is their inner state, each in crisis for a lost relationship or an impossible relationship, that gives the urgency and emotional depth to Egoyan’s film. Place is also the outer skin for Karen and Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing. Contemporary ultra-urban New York is the setting and as in the case of the Egoyan film, the inner emptiness or dissatisfaction of the characters is the common thread that gathers together its characters into a narrative.
Place is helpful but not enough in Schamus’s The Ice Storm (1997). He uses time, the four days around Thanksgiving, 1973, and he uses family, specifically two families—husbands, wives, and two children, neighbors in an upper-middle-class Connecticut suburb. Tod Solondz follows the same structural choices in Happiness (1998), principally following a family for three generations, and adds a patient of the son-in-law psychiatrist in the family. New York/New Jersey/Florida is the geographical setting; the time setting is contemporary. The inner structure of these stories is principally the voices of Schamus and Solondz. For Schamus and director Ang Lee, they are interested and empathic about the unhappiness of their characters. Solondz, on the contrary, is more interested in skewering his characters with his unhappiness about their unhappiness.
The loosest structure of all is achieved by thematically affiliating different stories. In Before the Rain, Milcho Manchevski tells three stories about Macedonia (during the 1990s, of the Balkan wars, including Bosnia and Macedonia). The war generates parallel tensions between the two racial and religious minorities, the Albanian Muslims and the Christian Macedonians. The outer structure is similar to Pulp Fiction —the idea of a 24-hour clock. Within the clock, the three stories will proceed out of chronology, with the last story ending as the first story is about to begin. Consequently, in the course of the film, we feel we come full circle. Within that outer structure, three independent stories unfold, each story with its own internal integrity and progression. Two are love stories where two unlikely partners come together to help the other, and each story ends with the death of the unlikely partner. Each dies because she or he transgressed religious boundaries. They try to save a Muslim or a Christian, and one of their co-religionists kills them for crossing that boundary. The middle story, set in London, has a British couple going to a restaurant, where the wife tells her husband that she will leave him. An argument among the present staff and former staff (Macedonian, presumably Muslim) ensues, and the result is a shooting in which the innocent British husband is killed. The wife is now free due to the random local Balkan violence. In Before the Rain, it is the theme that provides the unity to the stories. Racial hatred destroys love. Theme rather than character or place provides the inner structure for Before the Rain.
An idea is also the shaping device for Don McKellar’s and Francois Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1994). The idea that genius is an eccentric, brilliant resistance to structural definition is captured by presenting Glenn Gould’s life as a loose chronology of episodes, each of which differs from the other. A half-dozen episodes are documentary, at least three are animated, and the balance consists of dramatized episodes that differ considerably from each other. The film is reminiscent of an MTV approach to biography—32 self-contained episodes.
A more conventional but no less non-linear approach is taken by McKellar and Girard in their next film, The Red Violin (1998). An object, a violin, is followed from its nineteenth century creation to its current status. Episodes focus on the violin’s owners through four centuries. Italy, Austria, England, China, and Canada locate the action. The episodes share neither tone nor idea. The only common thread is the violin itself. Because there is no deeper conceit, the film is less interesting, but it remains a non-linear narrative told along a loose chronology.
Natural Born Killers (1994) also uses a loose MTV idea for its structure. Here Oliver Stone uses the careers of two serial killers, Mickey and Mallory, as the outer structure. In the inner structure is a series of scenes unified by the notion that there is a link between media manipulation and violence. Are Mickey and Mallory a product of the media or is their career encouraged by the media? Stone links each MTV episode of the film to affiliate ideas about violence and media manipulation.
Whether the structure is loose or layered, it is critical to note the difference from the linear three-act structure. The non-linear film may be organized in two acts or without act breaks. More often it has numerous story lines that are integrated into two-act stories or into brief MTV-style short films loosely linked into the larger film. Again, key here is how very different the structure of the non-linear film is when compared to the linear film.
The last property that differentiates the non-linear film from the linear is tone. As mentioned in the previous chapter, tone tends to proceed along the story form expectations. The Western tends to be pastoral and poetic. The war film tends to be realistic. The thriller and the melodrama tend to be realistic. The horror film tends to be expressionistic, over the top. The tone adds to the credibility of the experience of the film.
Tone in the non-linear film tends to be less predictable. It can even vary within a story. What drives the tone is the writer’s intentions and voice. Consequently, the tone of Anderson’s Magnolia is in turn fabulous, then realistic, and, toward the end, when an intense storm yields a downpouring of frogs, it again becomes fabulous. Is Anderson using the melodrama or the fable as his story form base? Whichever it is, the non-linear narrative is the meta-genre that embraces the work. Similarly, Terence Malick uses a poetic meditative tone rather than realism in his war film The Thin Red Line. This variation in tone enables Malick to consider issues of life and death, permanence and impermanence, and the general issues of values in this war film. Critical here is that tone does not operate within story expectations as it does so often in the linear narrative. Consequently, the non-linear film is more malleable to the voice of the writer or writer and director.
Issues for the Non-Linear Screenplay
Character
The issue of writing a story in which the character may or may not have a goal immediately raises the issue of energy. In the linear film, the goal of the main character clashes with the goal of the antagonist. The plot additionally provides opposition to the goal of the main character. Conflict, and implicitly energy, abound, which in turn engages the viewer.
If the goal of the main character or multiple characters in the non-linear narrative is absent, where does the needed energy come from? Or to put it another way, audiences want to be involved with a story. Energy is attractive as well as involving. That energy has to be present in a narrative, in all stories, linear or non-linear. Goals simply make the creation of that involving energy easier. Take away the goals and the job of creating the needed energy becomes harder but nevertheless critical. So where and how does the non-linear storyteller create energy?
In order to address this issue, it’s best to focus on the scene rather than on the narrative as a whole. First, the writer should be aware that energy can be created by positioning a character in a conflictual scene. The opening scene in Happiness has a young couple, clearly romantic in intention; perhaps a proposal is in the offing. Instead, one character breaks off the relationship with the other. We could look at this scene in another way by saying that the two characters in the scene have opposing intentions—one of them wants to cement the relationship, the other wants to end it. Similarly, if we look at a scene in Magnolia, the Tom Cruise character, a salesperson-guru for hyper-masculinity, is being interviewed by a black female journalist. He begins the scene changing his clothing (provocative), being a sexual tease. Shortly after the interview begins, the journalist accuses Cruise’s character of making up (and distorting) his past. She is calling him a liar. He is looking for yet another seduction, and she is looking for an expose, a good story.
A second strategy to create energy is to use dialogue in an unexpected way. Here Pulp Fiction provides a good example. Two hit men are going to kill someone for non-payment for drugs. What they talk about is eating, foot massages, and habits of the French. What they don’t talk about is the job. Their gossip is a surprise and acts as a counterpoint to their intentions and consequently it creates tension and energy. Anderson uses dialogue precisely in the same way in Magnolia. The words, the pace of delivery—both will add to the emotionality and consequently to the energy level of the scene.
The Suitability of Plot
As mentioned earlier, plot may or may not be used in the non-linear story. When it is used, it is often background, as it is in the first and last stories in Pulp Fiction. In the fable and in the docudrama, however, plot is indispensable and vital. Plot can generate the energy that is not present in the characters. And plot is found in greater amounts in these two story forms. If a fable is the form being used, as in Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior (2001), there may be different plots affiliated with particular characters. In Kusterica’s Underground (1995), the entire post-war history of Yugoslavia provides the plot. Returning to the Tykwer film, a truck accident brings two characters together, one as victim and the other as rescuer. Later, a bank robbery plot reverses the roles—the character who was the victim in the first plot becomes a rescuer and the character who was the rescuer becomes the victim. Each plot serves a different purpose. In and of themselves, the plots seem almost arbitrary, but Tykwer brings them to bear on each of the characters.
What to realize about plot is that it is deployed very differently in the non-linear film than it is in the linear film.
The Importance of Voice
What has been implied so far is that the non-linear story has strengths (inviting more audience participation) and weaknesses (posting barriers to involvement); the key issue that can strengthen the experience of the non-linear story is the active presence of the voice of the writer. Voice not only supplants character as the key to the story experience, it also provides the writer with the kind of flexibility that can be liberating.
Again, the opposite illustrates the possibilities. In the linear narrative, the writer must conform first to the issue of identification with the main character and second to a structural approach that keeps us with the character. Having kept us with the character, the opportunity to share views of the writer becomes muted, indirect, and contained. What is so critical about the non-linear story is that its subversion of structure and character enables voice to be pronounced, clear, and important.
As mentioned earlier, the intention of Terence Malick in The Thin Red Line is to create a meditation on the value of life and the meaning of death, and consequently scenes are constructed not to focus on the progression of the battle but rather to emphasize the life and death views of Malick. In Jill and Karen Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing, the random stories of a half-dozen New Yorkers link modestly but thematically. Each story is a tale of dissatisfaction and urban angst. Voice unifies and makes urgent the four stories that are told. In the non-linear story, voice is central. Writers do use story forms that enable voice but are not restricted to those story forms. The Sprecher film is a melodrama, as is Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Kusterica’s Underground is a fable, as is Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior. The fable is far more malleable to voice than is the melodrama.
The Importance of the MTV Style
The MTV style focuses upon the scene and treats it as if it were a distinct, separate film. The emphasis is also on feeling rather than exposition. Again, the benefit is intensity. Given the looseness of the nonlinear film and its shift away from character, the MTV style can generate the kind of intense involvement seen in the linear thriller, for example. The consequences of using the MTV approach are visible in vastly different films, including Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, and Solodnz’s Happiness. In each case, this attitude toward the scene can help the writer overcome the less involving narrative strategies of the non-linear narrative (for a more detailed look at the MTV style, see Dancyger, The Technique on Film and Video Editing1).
Contentious Areas in the Non-Linear Story
Because the non-linear story so often has alternative narrative goals, there are issues that writers don’t often need to address. If the writer is conscious of these problems, it is possible to work to counter them. The most obvious problem of the non-linear story is that it is less involving than the linear story is. Writers of non-linear video games provide choice for the player in order to encourage that involvement. Others go overboard on plot. Still others populate their stories with outrageous characters. All are taken up with the need to involve viewers in a story form that by its nature does not actively invite involvement. Whatever the strategy, it is critical for the writer to concern himself with the problem of involvement.
The attendant problem is boredom. Here writers look to plot, exaggeration, and over-the-top dialogue to avoid boredom. Certainly it worked in Pulp Fiction, but those who have tried to imitate Pulp Fiction have not been as fortunate. The novelty of being first benefited Tarantino’s film; his imitators have not had such an advantage. The deeper solution to boredom is to involve us either with voice or to be different from the prevailing stories and approaches to a story. This is the reason Alan Ball was successful with American Beauty. It was different. Writers, especially writers of non-linear stories, need the edge of novelty.
Finally, writers have to acknowledge that the MTV impulse and the nonlinear story have yielded an emphasis on sensation (short term) over feeling (the story as a whole). Deeply felt narratives have come to be regarded as old-fashioned (read linear), whereas non-linear stories are rife with sensation through plot, dialogue, or tonal change. The issue for the non-linear writer is to try to overcome these problems endemic to the non-linear story—to find creative solutions that generate energy and creative difference to highlight the voice of the writer and to make unique the experience of the audience.
Reference
1. K. Dancyger, The Technique on Film and Video Editing, 3rd ed. (Boston, MA: Focal Press, 2002).