By Steven Rosen
(This story first ran in 2006, but I'm not sure where -- SR)
Robert McKee, the screenwriting lecturer and author of
“Story,” believes that three distinct styles of movie narrative occupy a
pyramid of importance – classical design, minimalism and anti-structure.
The first is by far the most popular, with its single
protagonist, external conflict and closed, tightly wrapped-up endings. Minimalist
comes next – challenging narratives with multiple protagonists, inner conflicts
and sometimes-ambiguous open endings. And then there’s anti-structure – films
not afraid to call attention to themselves as films first, stories second.
David Lynch, for instance.
“When you go down the triangle, you’re eliminating the
audience,” McKee said during a Los Angeles seminar this year. “Absolute forms
of minimalism and anti-structure just don’t seem like life to them. What you’re
left with are cineaste intellectuals who like to have their worlds twisted
every now and then.”
Well, maybe. But there sure seem to be a lot of movies out
this fall – big-budget, high-profile Hollywood productions as well as smaller
art films – that toy with or completely embrace these “audience-eliminating”
styles. A few examples:
Ø Babel:
Making abrupt, unannounced switches in chronological order, this film from
director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga very loosely
connects three downbeat stories set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan, each
featuring characters with much inner angst.
Ø Bobby:
Writer-director Emilio Estevez interweaves and in some cases leaves unresolved
the stories of 22 characters staying at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel when
presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was fatally assassinated there in 1968.
Ø Déjà
Vu: This Jerry Bruckheimer/Tony Scott drama starts as a conventionally plotted
thriller about a terrorist, but veers off into complicated layers of parallel
construction as the hero – and the film – travels through space and time to
save a dead woman’s life.
Ø Happy
Feet: This animated feature from “Mad Max” director George Miller – already
unusual in featuring penguins who sing and dance yet otherwise live in the
Antarctic like actual penguins – breaks a Fourth Wall when they come into
contact with realistically rendered humans who are amazed that penguins can tap
dance.
Ø The
Fountain: Darren Aronofsky moves between three time periods – the 16th
Century world of a Spanish conquistador, the present world of a novelist, and
the future world of a space traveler.
Ø Fur:
An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus: Rather than a conventional biopic about
the photographer attracted to outsiders, Steven Shainberg’s film turns into a
weird “Alice-in-Wonderlandish” blending of realism and fantasy in which Arbus
(played by Nicole Kidman) is attracted to a semi-mythical hair-covered “freak”
living upstairs.
Ø Inland
Empire: David Lynch’s three-hour opus is beyond description, as it moves
randomly between an L.A. actress (Laura Dern) losing control of her identity to
hookers dancing to Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” to rabbits in clothes, living
in an apartment, whose every word is accompanied by a sitcom laugh track.
Ø Stranger
than Fiction: Writer Zach Helm’s film, directed by Marc Forster, stars Will
Ferrell as an IRS agent who discovers he is actually the character in a novel
being written by Emma Thompson. Worse, he thinks the film’s voice-over narration
is coming from inside his head.
So what gives? It seems to be the
impact of several outside external sources: Heralded self-referencing screenwriter
Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation”); the Oscar-winning
success Paul Haggis’ ensemble drama “Crash”; the impact of hit television
dramas influenced by “Hill Street Blues;” and the ongoing pressure for auteurist
directors and writers to establish credentials by offering something new.
“We’ve run out of new content,”
says Howard Suber, a longtime professor of story structure at UCLA’s School of
Theater, Film and Television and author of “The Power of Film.” “It’s hard to
think of any subject, any kind of story, where somebody could say, ‘No film has
ever talked about what this film talks about.’ That leaves, if there are
aspirations to be an artistic filmmaker, experiments with style.”
This seems to have been a
motivation for Shainberg and his writing partner, Erin Cressida Wilson, on
“Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus.” In a way, it’s stylistically an
anti-biopic – similar in inspiration to the way writer Kaufman in 2002’s
“Adaptation” turned Susan Orlean’s book “The Orchid Thief,” about an orchid
collector, into a weird meta-struggle between Kaufman and his twin brother
(both played by Nicolas Cage) to adopt Orlean’s book.
Another such “anti-biopic” may
appear in 2007 – Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning
Dylan” – in which seven actors, including Cate Blanchett and Richard Gere, play
Bob Dylan at different career stages.
“Why is this happening? I could
give you a meta-answer,” Shainberg says. “It’s about how much media there is. It’s
about how much information we get about everyone and how just portraying it
straight really isn’t interesting anymore.”
That explains the motivation. But
why is the audience receptive – or, at least, not in open revolt – to such experimentation?
Because film is a very good medium for it. It’s especially good for directors
who want to visually play with the logical order of time and space. “One of the
things film does better than any other medium is cut back and forth between
time and space,” Suber says.
Filmmakers historically have been
more conservative about narrative experiments. Directors and writers felt they
inherited a tradition going back to Greek theater of basic stories around a
major problem of a central character, with all else secondary. Successful
variations were few, like Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” because audiences tended
to view open-ended multi-character stories as dramatically flat or too
complicated to follow.
Now the approach is hot. It is
identified with directors like Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”) Wes Anderson
(“The Royal Tenenbaums”) and Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights”). Coming up
is Karen Moncrieff’s “The Dead Girl,” featuring Toni Collette, Marcia Gay
Harden, Mary Beth Hurt and Brittany Murphy as women affected in different ways
by a serial killer.
Suber says ensemble-cast
television dramas with ongoing “multithreaded” plots, especially the
groundbreaking “Hill Street Blues” of the 1980s and later “ER,” changed the
audience. “It took the audience a long time to deal with what was initially
confusing,” he says. “But once they learned, they had learned storytelling that
was infinitely more complicated.”
And films are eager to take
advantage of that.
(Photo is of David Lynch)
