——————9——————

NEW MODELS

In this chapter we look at narrative models that have become important in the last twenty years. They don't really fit into the Hollywood model, although some of them have been produced in Hollywood. Nor do they fit into the independent model or the national model, although some of them have been produced independently or in Europe or Asia.

In part these narrative models have developed out of the constant search for novelty in an essentially conservative medium. The paradox of wanting both to have a mass audience and to challenge that audience, to surprise that audience is at the core of the development of these narrative modes. These narrative modes—which I call myth, MTV, women telling stories, and nonlinearity in narrative—are now certainly more than a passing phase, and so we have to contend with them as narrative models. But before we do we should try to understand why they have developed.

The first point to be made is that the past twenty-five years have been a period of tremendous technical innovation. Technology in production has advanced in every area to the point that film and video have blurred in their distinctiveness with the consequent growing influence of television on film and of film on television. Production techniques have been enhanced by the digital revolution to the point where every characteristic of a single image can be added to or subtracted from. The result is a totally malleable image, a virtual reality, and a tremendous range of visual and aural possibilities in production. That process of amendment continues in postproduction where nonlinear digital editing allows for further enhancement or subtraction in the organization of images. These advances in technology have enhanced the power of the medium to create, distort, and entertain its audience. Simultaneously, it has encouraged skepticism about the veracity and the intentions of this growing power. This is the backdrop for the development of new forms and intentions that attempt to deal with, use, and in many cases, subvert this new technological reality with a narrative experience that reestablishes its connectivity with its audience.

This might mean narratives that are throwbacks to primitive or earlier forms and formulas, films that portray a myth, such as George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) or Luc Besson's The Messenger (1999). Or the narrative might be a reaction to formula where the filmic storyteller attempts to create a new myth, as in Julio Medem's Cows (1989) or Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997). What is clear in all of these examples, formulaic and antiformulaic, is that the narrative trajectory is essentially nonverbal, a fact that takes us to the second observation about these new modes.

This same period of twenty-five years has seen a new level of internationalization in media penetration. The nonverbal travels across language and cultural barriers far more effectively than does the verbal narrative. This is why MTV has been so powerful a force in creating an international audience. This is why reality TV, popularized in Europe, has become so rapidly widespread in North America. Television, principally cable television, has been the subversive delivery system that has rapidly internationalized the market for film narratives that are new and different. The result is a receptivity for MTV narrative and for nonlinear storytelling.

Paradoxically, the technological changes together with the internationalization of the market has produced two extreme impulses—the democratization of the medium and the search for a new elite in narrative. Democratization has led to modest productions such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) having tremendous success. And it has led to a scale of technological elitism (Cameron's Titanic is the best example of this impulse), a scale of production that taxes the resources of two production studios simultaneously. Whether this paradox will skew in one direction or the other is unclear, but the success of the Dogma 95 films such as Vinterberg's The Celebration (1998) is encouraging. See Chapter 12, “The Search for New Forms,” for a full discussion on The Celebration.

One last point must be made before we look at these new narrative forms and that is the growth of nonlinear narrative. In a sense, the nonlinear narrative is a strong reaction to the Hollywood film. Rather than the energetic goal-directed character in a plot-driven narrative that moves from critical moment to resolution and closure, the nonlinear film has no single main character, the characters have no goals, there is no plot, and there is no resolution. It almost sounds as if there is no story. But there is. It's a story that requires a far more active role for members of the audience. They have to work to fill in the narrative gaps, to make sense of the behavior and the intentions of the characters in the story, and somehow to find a worthwhile purpose to the experience of the nonlinear narrative.

This is very different from the traditional three-act structure, with its plot and its character that are readymade for us to identify with. The interesting question is why these narratives, films such as Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1993), have been as successful as they have been. I think the answer also lies in the changes of the past twenty-five years—in the cross-pollination of the film and television industries, in the internationalization of the market for film and television, in the simultaneous drive for formulization and the reaction to formula. It's a different, discontinuous, fractured, global world, and the experience of the young audience (ages 15–30) especially differs from the experience of the previous generation. MTV, computers, and increased mobility have provided a different life experience for this new generation, and the nonlinear narrative manages to capture the fragmentation that has been so much a part of their mode of experience. The consequence is that the nonlinear film can be experienced as a more believable narrative than a traditional linear narrative, which is experienced as quaintly old-fashioned. So the nonlinear narrative form is a form that is new and that may not be as transient or trendy as it was initially thought to be. Now let's turn to these new modes of storytelling.

MYTH

Whether the new narrative impulse is a formulaic myth or a new form of myth, this form has particular characteristics that will make the main character a larger figure—either the ultimate hero or the ultimate victim. In order to create enough dramatic amplitude to establish the hero or victim the dramatic arc often looks like a journey. In the more predictable interpretation of myth, this would mean a super-antagonist, but myth is not predictable and so the antagonist per se is not equivalent to the antagonist in the action-adventure film. Rather, the dramatic amplitude comes from the clash of the outer world of plot and the inner world of the main character's psychological struggle. Generally, those two worlds are incompatible, with the consequence that the struggle seems far more inner-directed.

In a sense, David Lean tries to create a myth in his Lawrence of Arabia (1962), as does Bille August in his film Jerusalem (1996). But the Lean character struggles with the personal identity issue while the August character struggles with obligation. Lawrence's deeper struggle helps create the mythical proportion of the character, while Ingmar's promise to his father in Jerusalem is not personal enough to make Ingmar's struggle carry the dramatic amplitude needed to create myth. Ingmar agrees to take care of the family and the community. His father, as leader of the community, has this sense of obligation, naturally. To hoist this obligation on to a young boy is to designate him a future leader. Ingmar respects his father but events and characters pull the community toward other leadership and to destruction under that leadership. Ingmar simply doesn't have the depth to understand and meet the needs of the community. He is too caught up in family and personal challenges and so he fails to fulfill his promise to his father.

To bolster the sense that the main character's journey is distinct, the plot is important. It needs to pose almost impossible challenges to the character's goal. In Lawrence of Arabia, the potential success of the Arab revolt in the desert is considered impossible. But just as important in the creation of the myth is the positioning of the other characters. They are skeptical about the goal of the main character, even those secondary characters whom we consider to be helpers. In this sense, the main character's journey is a solitary one, a journey that is not understood even by those who support the main character.

Luc Besson's The Messenger (1999) is a narrative treatment of the Jean of Arc story that recreates the mythic character and the myth of Jean. The story is well known. Jean is a young woman who claims to be instructed by God to lead France against its British invaders and to reclaim France for the King of France. For her efforts and her successes Jean is turned over to the British who have her tried as a heretic and burned at the stake. But the tide is turned, and eventually the French defeat the British who retreat permanently from French soil.

Besson structures the story in three movements: Jean as a child; Jean's obsessive efforts to mobilize the Dauphin and his forces against the British at Orleans, culminating with the crowning of the Dauphin as the king of France at Reims; and finally the betrayal of Jean and her spiritual struggle leading to her physical death. She dies at age 19.

In the first movement, Jean as a child is obsessed with confession. (Although one could use the Act description, movements imply the myth in operation. Acts humanize the character too much.) She is deeply religious. She has visions. One day she finds a sword in a field. That very day the British invade her village. She is saved by her sister whom she watches as she is brutally killed and then ravaged. The most powerful quality of this movement is the profound religiosity of Jean. It is presented almost as a madness, which is not understood by her family. It is also a possession that is not understood by the young Jean. She only understands that she is kinetically moved by her relationship to religion, to its power. For Jean, confession is an outward expression in the world of the power of her sense of religion. The death of her sister, its cruelty, in no small measure narratively establishes the British as the antagonist force, the expression of earthly evil that will embody the antagonist in the second and third movements.

In the second movement the nineteen-year-old Jean rides to rally the Dauphin, to request that he give her an army to march on Orleans. The Dauphin, skeptical and fearful of earthly plots against him, plays a game with Jean. He pretends to be a member of his court while he places one of his associates in his place. If Jean accepts the associate as the Dauphin she is false. But Jean does not fail the test. She identifies the Dauphin in spite of his disguise. Perhaps she is as she claims, a messenger from God.

Privately, Jean shares her plan with the Dauphin, to inform the English they must leave France. If they do not, she will march to Orleans, which is presently besieged by the English, and liberate the city. She is neither a seasoned soldier nor a powerful political personage. According to the Dauphin's advisors, she is mad and dangerous, and it is an act of naivete and madness to entrust the army to the command of this maid. But the Dauphin, feeling he has tried all else, supports Jean. She goes immediately to Orleans. There the army is under the command of the cousin of the Dauphin. He and his nobles are soldiers and men. They want to humor Jean, but her forcefulness and her mystical bond to the common people who populate their army temper their contempt for Jean. They lie to her about the timing of the battle, but in the end she takes command by the force of her will. She is wounded, but the next day she again takes command, surprising the English who assume that she is only a woman. Whether it is the politics at the Dauphin's court or the gender politics of the leadership in the French and English armies, Jean is always opposed. Nevertheless her belief is so great that in the end she overcomes the impregnable defenses and the skepticism of the French leadership and retakes Orleans. The movement ends with the crowning of the Dauphin as the King of France.

The third movement focuses on the betrayal of Jean at the gates of Paris. She has been promised reinforcements but envy in the new king's court shifts the monarch's loyalties and he betrays Jean. He now thinks that it would be better to negotiate with the English. The sacrifice of Jean will be the signal of goodwill in those negotiations. When Jean is taken, the Burgundian bishops are encouraged to set up an ecclesiastical court to try her for heresy. Although the English want her burned to eradicate a military and political threat, the Church fears being seen as a pawn of the English. If she acknowledges her sins she will not be burned. But Jean, who possesses the religious belief that has been her core, does not recant. She tells the court that she is a messenger, and the message is that she must deliver her people from the tyranny of the English. The King of France must lead his people to push the English out of France. Jean is a believer; she is not a witch. And the voice of God speaks through her with a political message.

Throughout this movement Jean carries on a dialogue and a debate with a priest. Is he a figment of her imagination? This test of her faith is an internal test just as the ecclesiastical trial is ongoing and external. In the end, Jean is burned because she is a threat to the English, but the bishops have clearly been unsettled by the vigor of Jean's belief. Finally, that belief is converted into national action as the French act in accord with Jean's message.

The story of Jean of Arc has been told many times on film. It works least well when it merely echoes the historical facts, as in the Otto Preminger version, Saint Joan (1957). It works best when the writer-director establishes the internal struggle of Jean over issues of faith and politics, as in Carl Dryer's The Passioiz of Joan of Arc (1929) or in this version, Besson's The Messenger (1999). Both achieve the level of the myth of Jean of Arc.

Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997) is also a narrative about faith and politics, in this case the story of the current Dalai Lama, from the point of his discovery as a three-year-old boy to his departure from Tibet. As in the case of The Messenger, Kundun is organized around movements: the discovery of the boy; his leaving home for Lhasa, the capital; his education; his personal losses; the invasion of Tibet by China; his efforts to peacefully coexist then negotiate with China; and finally, his nonviolent protest against the Chinese occupation—his departure for India.

Throughout the film, the spiritual is constantly in conflict with the practical, whether it is with his love life, his leadership role in Lhasa, or in his visit to Beijing to meet with Mao Tse-tung. It is as if the making of the Dalai Lama is an internal spiritual journey and the plot, the invasion of Tibet by China, tests the Dalai Lama's values for himself and for his people. In many ways, the sequences progressively reveal the maturation of the inner life of the spiritual leader of his nation. In contrast, the behavior of his advisors and of the Chinese sets the Dalai Lama apart. Everyone seems far more political than he is, which makes his sense of spirituality all the more powerful. What makes Kundun a myth is the inner certainty of the Dalai Lama that spiritual values are higher and more enduring than temporal values such as politics and the behavior political power implies.

A good contrast to the myth of Kundun is Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), a melodrama whose main character, the last emperor of China, becomes a victim of the power struggle between Nationalists, Communists, and the Japanese for the control of China (the plot). The experience of the two films couldn't be more different.

THE MTV NARRATIVE

The MTV narrative is essentially storytelling that is influenced by the music video. Rather than a linear story constructed in three acts, the MTV narrative is constructed along a linear frame, but rather than three acts, the narrative proceeds along a series of set pieces. As opposed to a sequence which could be 30 minutes or longer, a set piece could be quite brief—2 to 4 minutes—and so the entire film might be made up of 30 set pieces. The set piece is equivalent to a music video. Each set piece has its own tone, its own emotional core-a sensation or a feeling rather than an event that contributes to a progression of plot and character toward resolution. The set piece, because of its intensity, actually disrupts and undermines linear progression. That discontinuity extends to our sense of identification with the main character—if there is a main character.¹

Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) is an example of this style of narrative. Natural Born Killers is the story of Mickey and Mallory and their careers as serial killers. A good contrast to a similar story is Terence Malick's Badlands, which has a traditional gangster film approach to the narrative (a rise and fall shape), with a character layer that explains how personal relationships and family life contribute to the making of a gangster. Stone's treatment is far less conventional and utterly influenced by the MTV notion of set pieces. The story frame of Natural Born Killers is the career of Mickey and Mallory, including the night they met, Mallory's father's sexual abuse of her, and how getting away from her father essentially kick-starts their career, their capture, their imprisonment, and their escape, which concludes the narrative. Another important story element is the role a reality-TV journalist plays in the creation of the myth of Mickey and Mallory. He also facilitates their escape from prison.

What is important about the intervention of the MTV style is that the set pieces are small narratives in and of themselves. The opening set piece, for example, is set in a diner. Mickey has ordered himself some pie and Mallory has put a coin in the jukebox. Some hunters enter and they find Mallory's dancing provocative. One insults Mallory verbally, another insults her visually. In short order the killing starts, and before it's over three hunters and two restaurant workers are dead. A lunch break has turned grimly violent, set to pulsing music.

Soon we shift to a background set piece on how Mickey and Mallory met. The scene is presented as a situation comedy for television. Artificiality dominates. The scene quickly turns to emotional violence and physical violence. We quickly get the sense that these two young people may be very much in love, but they have a nasty habit of resolving conflict in a deadly fashion. The persecution/retribution theme proceeds through all the set pieces.

One of the side effects of this style of narrative is that we tune out for relief. This makes a sustained emotional experience impossible. The result is quite the opposite from the experience of the classical three-act structure.

Another example of the MTV style of narrative is Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1998). Here is the story of a Jewish waiter, Guido. World War II is about to begin. Italy is a combatant and Guido has a family. The problem is that he is a Jew. When Italy loses its status as an ally to Germany, Guido and his family are deported to a concentration camp. In order to sustain his son's spirits in the concentration camp, Guido is as playful as possible—everything is a game. By pretending, he instills an attitude in his son that is life-affirming rather than life-threatening. In the end, Guido sacrifices his own life to sustain this attitude in his son.

Both the pre-war narrative and the narrative in the concentration camp are developed as a series of set pieces. The overriding theme of those set pieces is that attitude can overcome any tragedy, and that play and laughter is life-supporting. The set pieces are thus all about tragic or accidental events whose outcome is blunted by the positive attitude of Guido. Is he a naïf or does he know something we don't know? The feeling created by those set pieces unfolds the plot, the progress of the Nazi war against the Jews of Europe.

A description of one particular set piece will give you a sense of Benigni's approach. The scene is early in the narrative. Guido has arrived in the city and he wants to open a bookshop but he needs an official to sign his application. The secretary is discouraging. He will wait. The official will not sign in spite of Guido's protestations. Its lunchtime. He'll have to wait for the next official to arrive in an hour's time. All he wants is a signature. He is outraged. The official suggest he file a complaint and leaves.

Guido is outraged and begins to dictate a complaint but the secretary is indifferent. He rushes to the window and shouts after the official. In h s zeal, he drops the window plant on the official. It shatters on his head. Apologetic Guido chases after the official but the official isn't accepting the apology. He tells Guido to forget a bookstore; his request will never be approved. The official then mistakenly picks up Guido's hat (a hat filled with eggs). The contents of the hat, the eggs, shatter and the infuriated official now threatens murder. Guido runs off stealing a bicycle to evade the infuriated official. He rides off but doesn't get too far before he virtually runs over a young woman who had given him the farm eggs the day before. Rather than chastise her or she him, they reconnect in a flirtatious manner. We know this isn't the end of the relationship (she will later become his wife).

This set piece, which has a narrative content, keeps twisting toward comedy, then farce, then hooks into a future narrative opportunity—a love relationship. None of it is rational, but it is entirely reasonable for a fable, which Life Is Beautiful is.

WOMEN TELLING STORIES

There are many female directors who do not endeavor to differentiate themselves very much from their male counterparts. Katherine Bigelow's Point Break (1991) and Mimi Leder's Deep Impact (1998) exemplify this impulse. On the other hand, there are women whose narrative approach differs markedly from that of men, enough so that a case could be made for the notion that women tell stories differently.²

The range of difference is, I believe, significant. From the edge of the mainstream, the work of Angelica Huston (Bastard out of Carolina [1996]) and Diane Keaton (Unstrung Heroes [1994]) focuses on character over plot, to the other extreme, the work of Su Friedrich (Sink or Swim [1990]) and Clara Law (Autumn Moon [1992]) opt for the experimental narrative form to voice their stories. Somewhere between these two extremes there are a number of film storytellers, particularly in Europe, who exemplify how differently women tell their stories.

Agnieska Holland, who is originally from Poland, has made films in America as well as France. Her film Olivier, Olivier (1993) is particularly unusual. It is the story of the effect of the disappearance of the youngest child on a family of four, and the consequent impact upon the remaining three when he reappears seven years later. Basically, the trauma of the original disappearance disintegrates the family. The father, a veterinarian, goes off to work in Africa, and the mother essentially falls apart, while the preadolescent daughter blames herself for what has happened. When a young teenager appears, claiming to be the disappeared boy, the family heals. The father returns, the mother is energized with hope. Only the daughter suspects that he is an imposter. He is. Olivier's body is found. A neighbor had molested and killed him. The film ends posing the question, What will happen to this family now?

What makes this narrative so interesting is that Agnieska Holland opts for four main characters rather than one. The traditional approach would be to experience the story through the mother, with the plot (the disappearance) proceeding as an important layer of the structure. By privileging all the characters—the mother, the father, the sister, and Olivier (whether the original son or the imposter)—their perceptions occupy the whole narrative. The subjective power of identification, as well as the force of plot, are all blunted, and what we are left with is the trauma for the whole family and the question of what we would do under such a tragic shadow. By opting for multiple points of view Holland has made the film a story of adults and children. All are vulnerable, and there is none of the closure that derives from the linear three-act approach to narrative. The open-endedness and the vulnerability of all the characters leaves us vulnerable.

Another important filmmaker is German Margarethe Van Trotta, whose film Marianne and Julianne (1981, also known as The German Sisters) is a story that also sidesteps a linear narrative. It is the story of two sisters in the troubled late-l960s, Julianne is a social pacifist and Marianne is a terrorist and an anarchist. The film opens with the suicide of Marianne's husband and closes with the impact of her suicide on Julianne. Von Trotta structures a series of concentric circles around the two sisters through time. We move into the past in a number of these circles, learning that their religious and repressive father was a Nazi and that Marianne and Julianne, each in her own way, had to reject the values of the father. In a sense, their suffering and anger has everything to do with individuation and generational strife. The more compliant daughter, Marianne, became an anarchist, left her child and husband (he commits suicide later), and eventually destroyed herself. The more responsible sister, Julianne, still suffers from the guilt generated by her rebellious adolescence. Each sister is trapped by the past.

The use of concentric circles rather than acts allows Von Trotta to reveal the feelings and the bond that connects these two sisters in spite of the divergent paths each has chosen. Instead of the linearity of the act structure, Von Trotta uses temporal scenes moving back and forth through time. Theses circles of revelation lay out the nature of the relationship. Because of this structure, the bond that unites the sisters becomes the lifeline for each that pulls them through personal and political trauma. The circles also serve to cut off events and other characters from becoming more than they are. By its structure, the film is really confined to the relationship of Marianne and Julianne, and the result is a powerful evocation of sisterhood.

There are other female filmmakers whose work is of great interest from a more didactic feminist perspective: Liliana Cavani (The Night Porter [1974]) and Lina Wertmuller (Swept Away [1974]) in Italy; Diane Kurys (Entre Nous [1983]) and Agnes Varda (Vagabond [1985]) in France; Sandra Goldbacher (The Governess [1998]) and Antonia Bird (Priest [1996]) in England. Although these women directors do approach their material in a far different manner than do their male counterparts, they balance their interest in the character layer with a greater attention to plot than either Von Trotta or Holland. Their work however does merit your attention.

THE NONLINEAR STORY

The nonlinear narrative, as I stated earlier, is the opposite of the linear three-act narrative. Whereas the three-act story has a goal-directed main character moving through a catalytic event to resolution, resisted by an antagonist and challenged further by the plot, the nonlinear story has none of these characteristics. There is not, in all likelihood, a single main character. The characters do not have apparent goals. The likelihood of a plot is remote, and if there is a plot as in The Thin Red Line, the progress of the war is distant from the narrative purpose of the majority of the characters and consequently, it may not have an apparent linkage to the characters. The narrative elements—character and structure—are united by a far more powerful sense of voice than is usually evident in a conventional three-act story, but beyond that, the cause-and-effect tightness of classical narrative is simply not in operation. However, there are other narrative devices that can help shape the narrative—a shared feeling or feeling state among the characters, for example, or a particular time or a special event that justifies the characters being in the story together. An example of a shared feeling becoming the common thread for the characters is operating in Paul Anderson's Magnolia (1999). In Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1992), it is a time-frame/event frame that pulls together the narrative. The majority of the family will be emigrating from an island to the mainland that very day. Both a place and a premise pull together the three stories in Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain (1994).³ The place is Macedonia and each story tells an interreligious love story that is in the end destroyed by religious hatred between Muslims and Christians.

The most famous and the most influential of the nonlinear films is Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Ostensibly a gangster film, the narrative is framed at its beginning and end with a prologue and an epilogue that occur in a restaurant. A couple, Ringo and Yolanda, decides to rob a bank in the prologue. In the epilogue, two gangsters, Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson), stop the robbery and move on to their daily activities, which are the subject matter of the first story. After the prologue we have three stories. They occur out of chronological order. If time were the organizing principle, they would follow the order of prologue, epilogue, story one, story three, story two. The linkage between the stories is primarily the characters—the two gangsters, Vincent and Jules, their boss, Marcellus, Marcellus' wife, and a boxer, Butch, who has the nerve to rip off Marcellus. The narrative events of the first story are split between two tasks—to execute some young malingering drug dealers who have failed to pay Marcellus in a timely fashion, and for one of the two gangsters to accompany Marcellus' wife for the evening. Marcellus is away. These two incidents, one plot, the other character layer, don't really provide more than a pretext to characterize the hit men. They have jobs, but they are uncertain about their identities, and so the narrative becomes a study in behavior under the pressure of high expectations.

The second story, the last chronologically, focuses on Butch, a prizefighter, who not only doesn't want to throw a fight for Marcellus, but he also cashes in on this fact. His betrayal of Marcellus and his consequent effort to escape Marcellus; his encounter with a Neo-Nazi gun dealer; the rape of Marcellus by the dealer; and the rescue of Marcellus by Butch—all constitute an essentially absurdist plot that makes no sense in terms of the rise and fall expectations of the gangster film. In fact, the plot arc here is one of victory rather than death, except for Vincent who is killed by Butch. In the second story, an absurdist plot, a focus on plot over character, and the shift in focus to a totally different character, have nothing in common with the first story—nothing but the tone. In both stories there are references to classic gangster films attitudes and behavior, and in those references the tone is humorous and ironic. Where we expect action, there is dialogue. Where there is action, it's absurdist rather than realist (as in the rape of Marcellus). The irony, the humor, and the running editorial comment on the genre unite stories one and two.

In the third story, which chronologically follows the first story, one of the drug dealers is being taken to Marcellus. Accidentally he is shot and the shooting makes a mess of the car (evidence to the police of wrongdoing). The hit men are directed to the home of an associate, where the car is cleaned up for the appearance of propriety (legality) so the hit men can proceed back to Marcellus. These are the narrative events, and they provide the opportunity for Jules to meditate on his chosen profession. This deliberation leads him to decide to leave the profession. The focus then shifts to identity, and once again the rise and fall shape of the gangster film is discarded. The absurdist tone links story three to the prior two stories, as does the appearance of the same characters, Vincent and Jules, in stories one and three.

What we are left with by the end of the film is a meditation on the gangster genre. The irony comments upon the values expressed in the classic genre and claims that the characters are modern gangsters, that they need a deeper sense of job satisfaction, that what they do is not terribly secure and there is no union, and that maybe they should find another line of work (before they die, as Vincent does, suddenly and without purpose). This is the tonal shaping device that unites these three stories. But the lack of a main character to follow leaves us to bring shape to the experience. That shape is open and will differ from person to person. Whether this is the result that was sought, we don't know, but it is the upshot of the nonlinear narrative experience.

In the case of Atom Egoyan's Exotica (1995) the shaping device is a place, a strip club called Exotica. As in Anderson's Magnolia, the characters in the narrative all share an emotional state: they are all wounded characters, traumatized by an event or person from their past. There is a modest plot about smuggling exotic eggs illegally into Canada, but the plot does not really contribute to understanding the behavior of the characters.

There are five characters that we follow. Thomas is the smuggler. He runs an exotic pet shop. Francis is the accountant who uncovers irregularities in the shop. Chloe is the pregnant owner of Exotica, the strip club, and Eric is the disc jockey of the club, who is the father of the baby the owner is carrying. Christina, a young dancer at the club, is the former lover of Eric.

We are also gradually told about a traumatic event in the past—the body of a young girl was found. Three of the five characters are marked by this incident. We only discover at the end of the narrative that the traumatic event shared by three of these characters is that the young girl was Francis's daughter, Christina was the girl's baby-sitter, and Eric was involved in the search for the young girl. In fact, Eric first met Christina on that search.

In their contemporary lives, these characters deal with their wounds by fabrication. Thomas evades his homosexual desires by smuggling. Francis pretends his daughter is still alive by having his niece “baby-sit” her. His fixation on Christina, his former baby-sitter, also keeps the affiliation with his daughter alive. Chloe is pregnant, but she sexually desires Christina rather than Eric. Eric was useful only to impregnate Chloe. Eric is wounded because he can't possess Christina who he wants to possess, but he can enter a sexual business relationship as the father of the unborn child.

There are no turning points in Exotica. It is a single act where people gather in a club and through their actions reveal their pain but not their goals. We don't really understand them or their actions until the end of the story. At that point we are left with the sense that shared pain is a form of mutual support. Even though these characters are not going to develop what I would call conventional relationships—marriages, even friendships—they do belong to the same club, so to speak the club of being damaged people. In a moment at the end of the narrative, Eric and Francis embrace. In that surprising gesture, these two men emotionally acknowledge their common bond—the impact of the trauma in their lives—the loss of a daughter for Francis, and the loss of his lover, Christina, for Eric. In that acknowledgment, there is a humanity that has been devoid from our experience of these two characters.

Whether Egoyan's goal was to look at the seamy side of life—strip clubs and smuggling—and find humanity there, or whether his goal was to look at the acute pain the characters in this narrative, this post-modern world, suffer, is difficult to conclude. As in the case of all the nonlinear narratives, the capacity for interpretation is as individual as the audience. Closure and linearity both yield a specific interpretation; nonlinearity yields the opposite.

NOTES

1. For a more thorough look at the MTV style, see Chapter 11 in K. Dancyger, The Technique of Film and Video Editing, Second Edition (Focal Press, 1996).

2. A detailed discussion of women telling film stories can be found in K. Dancyger, The Technique of Film and Video Editing, Second Edition (Focal Press, 1996), pp. 175–181.

3. A full discussion of nonlinear storytelling can be found in Chapters 12, 13, and 24 in The Technique of Film and Video Editing, Second Edition (Focal Press, 1996).