Driven

There is a pair of terms that fix, in a very unhealthy way, the horizon of what we think and say about movies at the present time, the early 2000s. I am speaking of the idea that a movie can be only one of two things: either plot-driven or character-driven. Many great films, however, are neither plot-driven nor character-driven. But they are driven. By what?

One of the most important films released commercially at the dawn of the 21st century is Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), a creative re-imagining of the tragic murder spree by two teenagers at Columbine High School in America. We see this devastating event only in the final minutes. The rest of it is about what leads up to that moment – the period of hours in which parents take their kids to school, staff arrive, classes begin, people move from one room to the next, and so forth. Elephant uses a particular and specific power of cinema, descriptive power: it shows, it traces, it unfolds a certain space and time.

Elephant is event-driven: it does not tell a story, it describes an event, looking at this event (the event of the massacre), circling it, coming at it from different angles, turning it over and contemplating it in different ways. It is spectacle-driven, preying on a certain kind of dread-filled suspense created within us as spectators. Having an inkling of what is to come at the end means that every footstep, every slow-downed second, every turn of someone’s head or odd explosion of noise creates a growing atmosphere of anxiety. Here again, Van Sant is exploiting, in a masterful way, one of the most basic and powerful properties of cinema as a medium: cinema not only gives us things to see, it also plays on our mounting desire for this spectacle to at last deliver itself to us.

Suspense or tension in movies do not have to concern a specific, personalised hero in danger or a central conflict; they can come purely from the movement of a camera, the rising arc of a sound, a gradual change in the colour palette of the screen, the choreography of a body.

Elephant is form-driven. The large-scale form of the film, the central formal idea which drives and generates the whole work and its unfolding logic, is in that literal and conceptual action of circling: walking around and around in space, winding back and forth and time – all of this contemplation and description traces a shape that forms itself in your mind as you watch the film, an architectonic form, with stresses and balances, energies and intensities.

So, what is happening in contemporary cinema? It is clear that new tendencies and experiments in popular storytelling have much to do with the digital age of video games, interactive art and hypertext writing. In the process, what was once considered formalist, avant-garde or hyper-modernist is becoming increasingly popular and everyday. When fervent subcultures grow up around tools like Machinima – which allows the customising of digital games so as to reinvent stories or non-stories using given elements of décor or character-types – we are entering a new consciousness about the possibilities of content and form in narrative.

Take, for instance, the levels in video games – working through one level before going up to the next. There are now Hollywood films that try to mimic this structure (like Thirteen Ghosts [2001]), but these are weak, literal-minded attempts at doing something that movies have always done in a rich and varied way. In cinema, there is a structure I call the plateau narrative. This is when you stay with a certain scene, situation or milieu for quite a while: you are in no hurry to drive the plot along, you are looking around, soaking up the atmosphere, exploring the nooks and crannies.

Stanley Kubrick adored this kind of structure, as do Víctor Erice and Chantal Akerman. They might make a film with just a couple of plateaux, or with very many. How do they get from one plateau to another? Well, it is like in a video game, only better: you have what in fiction is called a move, some major disturbance or transformation that suddenly shifts all the elements of the story and shoves them violently into the next stage. This is nothing like the traditional three-act dramatic structure.

Or take another basic staple of video games: how the action can play out in some multi-levelled structure, like a haunted mansion or an abandoned hotel, full of secret passages, trap doors, and so on. This kind of structure completely takes apart and rearranges traditional linear story logic. As if the story is in pieces - and now these pieces lay around waiting to be activated behind this door here, glimpsed through this window, or entered in that room over there. These rooms can be taken up in different ways, in different orders.

We can find this motif in many great art films of the past four decades, where it is called the House of Fiction – used with inexhaustible inventiveness by filmmakers including Jacques Rivette (Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974), Jean-Luc Godard (Detective, 1985), Wim Wenders (The Million Dollar Hotel, 2000) and Raúl Ruiz (Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, 1978). In one of the best examples, arch-formalist Roman Polanski’s horror-fantasy The Ninth Gate (2000), the House of Fiction becomes a Library, which is in fact one of its classic forms: each book is a gateway to a world, and the film traces the wandering between and among all these different worlds, and the movement from one level of a cosmic conspiracy to another – a kind of re-invented video game which re-finds the broken link between modern-day digital computer aesthetics and forms like Baroque art and the Gothic novel.

I have already mentioned description in a film, as posed against narrative. Description is what happens when you linger on a plateau, before a plot move: dwelling on that plateau, you deepen, intensify the gaze into the scene. But then the plot move comes to quicken or completely alter that slow, seeping process of transformation. So, there is a dialectical play of two speeds, the slow and the fast. In the computer age, we are seeing not just endless ‘fast fiction’ (as some lament and other celebrate) but also an expansion of the plateau, of the description phase.

Linking/hyperlinking to something can be a sudden, total break, or it can equally serve as a kind of infinite parenthesis, like the opening-up of a window in the image or a set of footnotes in a text. Numerous contemporary pop movies are obsessed with descriptive parenthesis, leading to what I think of as the file card device. When a character is introduced, like in the film Amélie (2001), we open up a background file in breakneck montage: where that character comes from, her likes and dislikes, recurring dreams, hopes and ambitions, and her dozen little neurotic tics, traits and tags.

But now let us go back further than the digital craze of today, back to narratives based on structures of dreaming, free-association, unconscious logic. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), written by Charles Kaufman (a true modern auteur in his own right) and directed by Michel Gondry, is a film about an experiment on the brain of Joel (Jim Carrey) – an operation to erase his painful memories of a love gone wrong, which itself starts going wrong, in several fascinating ways. Kaufman and Gondry have gone back to that great, semi-popular explosion of art cinema in the ‘60s for their inspiration.

I suspect that they are interested, above all, in the architectonic forms of ‘60s cinema: those deranged montage machines that jump back and forth between past, present and future, often inside an individual subjectivity that is in some way disturbed, fractured, unclear. I explore this history of forms further in my book Mysteries of Cinema (2018/2020).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind generates its narrative by adding to that ‘60s legacy and inspiration something very current, as well as something very ancient. The modern part is a psychoanalytic awareness of denial mechanisms, of black holes and revisions, lies and repressions, which attack and eat away at conscious memory. Joel’s mental world keeps disintegrating and regenerating, erasing itself and revising itself, going over the same material but in different ways, from diverse angles.

Yet there is also a childlike, almost innocent dimension to this film. This is its ancient quality, a sort of surrealism that existed long before a 20th century movement of art and thought called itself surrealism. In surrealist narrative, the weight of an obligatory storyline can be let go at any time. A character can wake up at any point of the tale and declare, “It was all a dream” – a move also carried out, with delirious consequences, by Brian De Palma in his remarkable Femme Fatale (2002). A character can turn out to be someone you could never have imagined that they were, thus solving everything – or wrecking everything.

Kaufman is another connoisseur of the bold narrative move that shifts plateau – and it is more often than not a surreal, unexpected move, the opening up of another world, or a world within the initial world. Every Kaufman script (including Being John Malkovich [1999] and Adaptation [2002]) is about the possibility of multiple destinies: the double life of your alter ago, the past self of which you are now a reincarnation …

This is a narrative cinema of the what if – speculative fiction. What-if stories often work on suggestion – and, little by little, the trickle of such suggestions creates a psychic swirl that drives the story with a logic of the unconscious. Filmmakers today keep playing at moving the borders between their nominal real story and the what-if speculation hidden inside it. Where does one end and the other start? In the films of David Cronenberg, for example, characters might suddenly wake up from a nightmare – but, even on repeated viewings, we can’t figure out exactly at what point that nightmare started. David Lynch loves inventing every kind of situation of dreamy reverie: floating off on a song, putting your head down to nap, trying to catch a distant recollection … and then suddenly we are in another world as surely as Alice went through the looking-glass, but without any discernible end to the hallucination. The film itself has transformed, anamorphosed.

What matters, ultimately, is the intensity of a film, not necessarily as a ‘story about people’, but rather as an event, as spectacle, as form and as gesture – and the resonances it sets off in you by all the means at its disposal.

This is a reworked fragment from the long 2004 essay “There’s a Million Stories, and a Million Ways to Get There from Here”, available in the Tier 3 PDF bonus of my Patreon campaign: www.patreon.com/adrianmartin

© Adrian Martin May 2005