TY - JOUR
AU1 - CAMERON, ED
AB - This article argues that the explicit narrative twist that constitutes the mode of narration of twist films opens the potential for an additional implied twist that emerges in the awoken interpretive process of the viewer. Relying on Roland Barthes's notion of the “writerly” mode of narrative, this article further argues that this mode of implied twist narration inadvertently rearranges the spectator relationship to story construction in potentially any film by bringing spectator desire into focus. Even though the so‐called twist film has been around at least since the silent era when Robert Weine made The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920, the critical examination of this narrative mode has only recently burgeoned, coinciding with a huge increase in the number of twist film productions starting in the 1990s.1 Most of these critical accounts focus on the expected ingredients, ranging from narrative unreliability, duplicity, and deviation to the lack of transparency, the restricted communicativeness of the narration, and an overreliance on unmarked subjective inflection. However, there is another important overriding consequence in the recent increase in puzzle films: these films inadvertently encourage an alteration in the nature of the spectator's relationship with commercial cinematic form, creating a relationship nearer to that promoted by art film. As Thomas Elsaesser claims, “The classical spectator positions of ‘voyeur,’ ‘witness,’ ‘observer,’ and their related cinematic regimes or techniques … are no longer deemed appropriate, compelling, or challenging enough” (2009, 16). This breakdown of the classical spectator expectations that is explicitly enacted by the twist/puzzle narrative may occur at the expense of the typical cinematic pleasure principle, as David Richter concedes, but it also provides a sort of surplus enjoyment for the spectator, as Elsaesser implies (Richter 2005, 12; Elsaesser 2009, 16). This surplus, I contend, implicitly permits the viewer to recognize an implied narrative twist while generating a film fabula (story) in potentially any commercially driven film, twist film or otherwise, that is not explicitly sanctioned by the film's own syuzhet (plot/discourse). This more fabulous fabula (story) of the twist film narrative—signposted by a seemingly obtuse diegetic detail or group of details that emerge when a twist film is given a scandalous look, as Roland Barthes would have it—is unintentionally promoted by the twist film's unique style of narration. When noticed, these details unravel the film's ostensible narrative and disclose a surplus level narrative buried within the film's overt, ostensible, and routinely received storyline.2 I. To Dupe Is To Err This surplus enjoyment is initially and briefly glimpsed when the film spectator of a twist film retroactively reconstructs the true story after the narrative twist, for which this type of film is nicknamed, has been revealed. All fictive feature films withhold crucial information and narrative material in order to create suspense and interest in the spectator, allowing the spectator to construct the film's story (fabula) piecemeal from the given discourse (syuzhet/plot) material. The discourse is the film material as presented; it is explicit. The story, on the other hand, is actually not given, and, in the words of Jonathan Culler, is a “tropological construct” of the spectator that is inferred from the discourse material; it is the result of the “demands of signification” and makes up a “non‐textual substratum” of the film text itself (1980, 29–30). It exists somewhere between the film text and viewer comprehension. On the surface, twist film narratives function much the same way, only these films seem intentionally cognizant of the story‐constructing mental activity of the spectator. Calculating this activity into the film's narration, the discourse material and the manner in which it is delivered in the twist film inevitably lead to the production of a false story in the mind of the spectator. The false story that the spectator infers throughout the viewing process is revealed as false usually by the final twist in the narrated material, forcing the viewer “to rethink earlier scenes” in an attempt to determine the correct intended story (Neupert 1995, 32). All the information and material that the viewer collected during the film are exposed at the end as being false leads, so to speak, based on misreporting or underreporting of events by an initially deceptive narrator, leaving the viewer no other choice but to then reconstruct the film's correct story retroactively and instantly once the concluding twist reveals the misleading nature of the film's narration (Anderson 2010, 87). There is a certain almost masochistic satisfaction the spectator receives from being duped in this manner, a satisfaction that differs completely from the usual cinematic pleasure the spectator felt during the film before the disclosure of the twist. This surplus enjoyment, an enjoyment in excess of routine cinematic pleasure, actually emerges from the spectator's awareness that his or her desire was a central element of the visual field of the film itself. The discourse of the film is itself a witting accomplice in the duping of the spectator, fully relying on the spectator's typical pleasure‐seeking activity and knowing full well that the story is largely over‐determined by discourse constraint. For sure most commercial films attempt to provide pleasure for the spectator, but the twist film seems calculated to expose to the spectator the manipulated nature of this pleasure by explicitly denying every initial inference the spectator derives from the film's discourse in his or her attempt to delineate a cohesive story. Although all twist films expose the viewer to the manipulated nature of filmic narrative through the revelation of the film's narrative twist, through the opening onto an alternative story, they just as quickly provide an alternative trajectory for fitting the film's discourse comfortably within a new comprehensive story. Because of its unreliable deliverance of discourse material, the twist film's narration ultimately reveals a secondary, or latent, story lying beneath the manifest (but erroneous) story. As Erland Lavik contends, “Here we find the kind of ‘doubling’ of the syuzhet, where we are led to construct a fabula that initially seems quite straightforward until suddenly a new piece of information is introduced that subverts (or decenters) the fictional world we have created” (2006, 56). With the revelation of the twist, the new piece of information, “we come to realize the presence of another fabula running parallel to the first one but ‘beneath’ it, hidden from view” (56). This “hidden” story remains latent, lying beneath the manifest story that the discourse has deceptively directed the spectator to construct. Even though these twist films reveal to spectators that their desire was taken into account from the start, built into the narrative structure itself, their twists still provide a completed intact story in the end and, thus, remain compositionally motivated and squarely within the desire for closure as a primary function of the classical Hollywood mode of narration. They remain, despite their nod to narrative deviation, readerly classical texts in Roland Barthes's sense: texts “committed to the closure system of the West” and “devoted to the law of the Signified” (Barthes 1974, 7–8). By explicitly staging the flexibility of story construction, these films provide an implicit critique of the Hollywood fantasy production system, a formal critique that is submerged into its own narrative structure. However, they also paradoxically provide another alternative classically closed storyline, ultimately restraining the limits of story construction within the bounds allowed by the added twist of the discourse. After the revelation of the twist in the narration, the viewer experiences a momentary enjoyment, which then gets reduced to the typical pleasure associated with the cinema when the new story is conveniently handed to the spectator. When the spectator is whiplashed by the revelation that Verbal is actually Keyser Söze in Brian Singer's 1995 The Usual Suspects, for instance, he or she is quickly able to correct the initial misleading narration with a new story, rooted in a recognition of the fictional and deceptive nature of Verbal's testimony as indicated by the closing discourse material. Even though the twist in this class of puzzle film indicates that part of the visual field is constructed to avoid the mastery of the viewer's vision and that illustrates the film spectator's limitation and masochistic desire, it also surreptitiously and inevitably provides the missing part of the discourse that eventually allows the customary pleasure of mastery that most commercial‐driven films provide. The imaginary mastery of the viewer is briefly exploded by the twist's revelation of the false story only to be reasserted with a new overdetermined story. The viewer is briefly exposed to an excessive element only for this excess to be folded back into an artificially closed narrative, recreating the illusion of unity. The latent, correct story provides a screen that quickly reduces enjoyment to typical cinematic pleasure. Two recent critical accounts of the puzzle film, however, inadvertently indicate an additional potential twisted narrative lying even beneath the latent story of the twist film, an implied twist in the film's discourse that unlocks, rather than constrains, the possibilities for story construction. In Elsaesser's already referenced article, he mentions how certain twist films possess “puzzling details that do not add up” (2009, 15–16), ultimately leading to films that have jettisoned the excessive obviousness of classical cinema for the new “excessively enigmatic” (37). Ultimately, Elsaesser concludes that the increasing emergence of the so‐called puzzle film has turned films from a mode of “realistic representation” into “rebus‐pictures” (39). Explaining how these new cinematic picture puzzle narratives alter the function of the spectator, Elsaesser explains: “A picture puzzle is also an image which via a different organization of the separate parts allows different figures to be recognized; it is an image which contains figures (usually animals, objects, bodies) which cannot be identified at first glance and require for their recognition an adjustment on the part of the viewer” (40). Elsaesser references Lars von Trier's use of “lookeys” in his 2006 film The Boss of It All. In this film von Trier placed several visual details into the film's discourse that were not directly aligned with the film's narrative in order to create “a new way of connecting with a passive audience” (Brown 2006). These so‐called lookeys have little to do with the linear narrative of the film or with the spectator's fabricated story but are still almost seamlessly incorporated into the film's diegesis as “visual disturbances” (Johnston 2008). Von Trier even held a public contest, awarding a cash prize and a chance to be an extra in a future von Trier film to the first viewer to spot all of the lookeys. In doing so, the lookeys took on a life perpendicular to the film's own storyline. In this manner, von Trier attempted to change the viewed object and the spectator's relation to the visual field by encouraging spectators to take a scandalous look at his own film's narration and to push its given narrative into the background.3 Edward Branigan has also noticed a change in the spectator's role in relation to the puzzle film's deviation from the classical narrative paradigm by utilizing Gerald Prince's concept of the “disnarrated” and his own concept of the “nearly true” (Branigan 2002, 110). Concentrating primarily on forking‐path, or alternative‐reality, films, Branigan notices that their narratives are overwritten in that they carry traces of an alternative story outcome that are nearly true, “that nearly become realized through the filmmaker and spectator” (2002, 110). Pointing out the latency inherent in twist films, Branigan concludes: “Within any film narrative lie alternative plots and failed stories whose suppressed realization is the condition for what is seen” (110). Even though Branigan directly focuses on forking‐path films, films that provide their own alternative “nearly true” reality, he leaves open the possibility that his theory can be applied to other films that do not explicitly provide the alternative discourse.4 Because of these suppressed, yet latent, narrative possibilities, Branigan believes “that one of the valuable tasks of interpretation is the uncovering of these hidden ‘narrative morphs,’ of these nearly true versions of the plot, which may lead toward … the uncanny in watching a film” (110). Ultimately, these “ghostly alternative plots” that remain buried in puzzle narrations can, it appears, be drawn out by the spectator since, as Branigan maintains, “the final author of the text is the spectator” (111). Here, Branigan and Elsaesser have traced out the possibilities of extending the surplus enjoyment allotted to the film spectator in ways that can reveal another layer in the twist film's narration, a level that more directly embodies a surplus enjoyment closely tied to the desire of the spectator. Elsaesser has indicated that the spectator's viewing of a film does not necessarily have to be passively directed by the demands of signification explicitly set up by the film's narration, and Branigan, likewise, points out that the spectator can develop a hidden story that is not clearly signified by the film. Because the twist film activates a suspicion in the spectator of any doled‐out story, both critics suggest, in essence, that the twist film can lead to a distrust of passive film viewing, a distrust that ultimately pressures the spectator to take a scandalous look at the elements on the screen and recognize a more fabulous story only implied within the twist narration's manifest and latent content. After all, since a story is only a tropological construction of the viewer, developed to meet the “demands of signification,” then the twist film's intentional planting of a false story into its narration has the unintentional effect of rendering its ultimate “true” story suspect as well, inviting the spectator to search for another not so explicit and a more artistically motivated twist in the film's narrative. Why, a suspicious viewer might ask, should the latent true story revealed by the narration's twist not be seen to be as distrustful as the original false one? Surely the twist in the discourse material can sustain this newly emerged story, but to what extent can it constrain story construction after it has revealed its own deceptive nature? II. Rustling With The Constraining Discourse Since the twist film manipulates the viewer into believing a false story, and since it disrupts the pleasure of film viewing, it provides a type of enjoyment not wholly restricted to story construction. As Harper Cossar argues, the twist film “constitutes a different narrative experience for the spectator, because the pleasure comes not in assembling the narrative as the film progresses, but rather in the revelation of what was missed” (2009, 17). The surplus enjoyment requires an additional viewing of the film (either literally or through the mind's eye) in order to spot the obtuse, “hidden” details that foreshadow the genuine story. Through a reviewing of the film, “we come to notice how traces of the correct story were actually available to us the first time” (Lavik 2006, 59). The foreshadowing details reveal how the true story was paradoxically both concealed and revealed by the discourse. Forcing the viewer to review a film in search of obtuse details potentially alters the manner in which a spectator views a film. If twist films have become the norm instead of the exception as they were in the studio era (Cossar, 2009, 18; Elsaesser 2009, 14), then they can have the unintended effect of making today's spectator take a scandalous look at any film's obtuse details instead of merely plotting the intended narrative, much in the manner von Trier attempted with The Boss of It All. Taking a scandalous look or looking awry at a film's narration allows the spectator to escape the confines of the codified pleasure of cinematic spectatorship. Likewise, noting details that anamorphotically disturb a film's own privileged narrative allows an implied, more fabulous story to emerge, one not explicitly authorized by the film's discourse. Von Trier's use of lookeys in his film The Boss of It All, for instance, operates by a similar logic. The seven lookeys placed randomly throughout the film are really only identifiable if the viewer eschews the traditional role of following the represented diegetic reality of the film's characters by taking a scandalous look at the puzzling details that not only do not add up but that are suppressed by the overriding narrative's attempt at closure. A lookey's presence destabilizes the coherence of the depicted narration by pointing to its suppressed details, indicating the possibility of a ghostly alternative story. In this manner, a recognition of the film's obtuse details allows the spectator to keep open the realm of enjoyment that is normally closed upon the establishment of the ostensibly true and more obvious story of a film. There exists, therefore, a more complex, more interesting, and more deviant mode of twist narrative—alluded to by Elsaesser and Branigan in their assessment of the puzzle film—that prevents the very narrative closure associated with the twist film specifically and most mainstream cinema generally. Here the twist emerges primarily through a mode of interpretation that tweaks out the obtuse kernel of the narration, hidden in the film's otherwise cohesive and unified narrative. In this mode of twist narration, the buried narrative details that lead to an alternative story, one not guaranteed by the film itself, only materialize through the active interpretive desire of the viewer, a desire that recognizes a signifier that signifies beyond the symbolic space of the given narrative, transforming the narrative into what Barthes refers to as a writerly narrative, a narrative that never stops writing itself. Unlike the already mentioned readerly narrative, the writerly text, according to Barthes, functions as a construction of interpretation because it is “a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds” (1974, 5). The twist in this writerly mode is not overtly provided within the film's narration, as it is in the recognized twist film; its existence has to be discovered by a penetrating insight of the observer, by looking at the film awry, rather than having it handed directly to the viewer by the narrator. Readerly strategies like this that are derived from art film spectatorship illustrate the twisted nature of a narrative that might, at first, not be encountered by a spectator as unreliable (Zerweck 2001, 154). Because the recognition of this type of twist relies heavily on the interpreter's role, its mode is contextual, as the twisted text emerges in the interaction of the viewer and the film, and, therefore, is largely a product of a reception‐oriented, or contextual, approach to narrative analysis.5 The deceptive narrative structure of the twist film actually helps validate the contextual field that potentially turns all classically oriented film narratives into retroactive twist films. I use the term ‘mode,’ slightly modifying Barthes's theory here, because the early distinction between readerly text (le texte lisible) and writerly text (le texte scriptable) that he introduced in S/Z was refined throughout the 1970s to reflect more a distinction between modes of interpretation rather than a distinction between types of texts. Initially with S/Z, Barthes was concerned with the epistemological break between the nineteenth‐century realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal and the growing roots of modernist experimentation, evidenced by the avant garde writings of Mallarme and Lautreamont. In Film Studies, this distinction might parallel the distinction between Classical Hollywood and European art cinema. The latter works are considered writerly because their more experimental and deviant form requires a high amount of interaction by the reader/viewer. They do not fully write themselves and, in a sense, need their writing completed by the reader/viewer through his or her sense‐making activity; the story is not directly furnished to the consumer. Erland Lavik has insightfully argued, in fact, that the twist film is an attempt to blend these two modes, to help render genre film artistic (2006, 58). In Barthes's Rustle of Language, his initial distinction is altered to the difference between “work” and “text” (1986, 56–64), the former referring to a text that is taken more or less as intended and the latter denoting a transformed work based on the interpreter's disfiguring interaction with the work. There are no longer two different types of texts; rather, a “work” becomes a “text” after it has interacted with the desire of the interpreter. In Camera Lucida, Barthes's privileging of the act of interpretation over type of text manifests itself most clearly in the distinction between the studium and the punctum. The studium is that aspect of an image that possesses mass appeal, that makes it recognizable and pleasurable in general. It is clearly on the side of the “author,” as it represents exactly what the photographer is trying to capture. The punctum, on the other hand, is an element in an image that sticks out to the viewer, that “pricks” and is “poignant” to the viewer, and that disfigures the intention of the image because it alludes to an obtuse detail that signifies otherwise, an otherwise embodied in the desire of the spectator (Barthes 1982, 27). By the time he composed The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes's advanced distinction between the pleasure (plaisir) and the enjoyment (jouissance) of the text more clearly demonstrates his growing attachment to the act of reading/interpretation at the expense of an interest in types of works per se (1975, 19–22). In our case, being duped by a twist film, for instance, creates a modicum of brief enjoyment beyond typical cinematic pleasure. However, once a twist film's twist reveals a certain flexibility in story construction, once it divulges the viewer's desire as an explicit determiner of the film's narrative structure, it simultaneously opens itself up to what Barthes terms a “third meaning”—a meaning largely produced through spectator interaction (1977, 52–68).6 Pleasure is derived from passively consuming the work as essentially intended, whereas enjoyment is to be derived through what Barthes refers to as “evaluation,” a method of critical activity that does not eschew the interpreter's desire, that essentially takes a “scandalous look” at the text in order to “fissure” its received meaning by locating its inherent excess.7 This is essentially the distinction Barthes originally made between the readerly, tied to passive consumption, and the writerly, attached to active evaluation. Barthes has condensed his notion of evaluation: “The problem is not to pass from writing to reading, or from literature to reading, or from author to reader; the problem is one of a change in object … a change in the level of perception” (1984, 141). Evaluation is based on the interpreter turning the viewed object, in this case, into an object different than the one obviously intended. By focusing on what might appear as insignificant or obtuse details, the spectator can see in the film an alternative story not strongly tied to the received one, a story that remains more or less fabulous in its own right because it is nowhere explicitly endorsed by the filmic text. Robert B. Ray has argued that an interpretive method like this possesses “the potential for a kind of knowledge based as much on invention as on recovery,” further mentioning how the visual image’s “inevitable involvement in chance details that imply significance” can result “in accidents that become clues” (1995, 112–113). Here, we hear an echo of Barthes's claim that typical criticism is constantly bogged down in seeking the obvious meaning, “always having to ignore the recalcitrant detail,” whereas evaluation allows the viewer to become fully invested in “the delights of the signifier and the exquisite enjoyment” of the writerly (Hill 2010, 103, 106). III. The Fan‐Double‐Dozy‐Tastic Story I begin fleshing out this notion of the implied twist by examining how a closer look at the twist film itself—since this type of film demands a closer look—can reveal a nonendorsed fabulous fabula (story) lurking beneath the ostensible one. Recognition of certain chance details can make a seemingly readerly twist film transform into a twist film of the writerly variety through a transformation of the preexisting, predetermined interpretive code. This narrative transformation can be explained through a brief examination of Otto Preminger's 1944 film noir Laura, a film that is, apropos enough, either a readerly‐mode or a writerly‐mode twist film, depending on the desire of the spectator. The obvious twist in Laura—the one that would place it in the readerly mode and the one that is intended to ultimately constrain the story—occurs halfway through the film when in turns out that, in the middle of the investigation of her murder, the titular character Laura arrives home from a trip out of town. She was actually upstate, taking some time off, when she was supposedly killed. It turns out that another woman was mistakenly killed in her place. Halfway through the film, therefore, the spectator is surprised to find out that his or her initial story construction was based on disingenuous information provided by the narrator. At this point, the spectator is forced to give up the initial supposedly manifest story and construct a new latent story that was only lurking in the background during the first half of the film. However, underneath this obvious twist lies a contextual twist, a twist indirectly provided by the film's discursive construction but lacking any overt articulation. Eschewing the interpolated spectator role and realizing that within the film “something is revealed that was always there, but hidden in another more conventional configuration” (Elsaesser 2009, 40), the viewer could conclude that the second half of the film—from the moment Laura herself enters the diegetic space as something in excess of a two‐dimensional portrait—is all just Detective Mark McPherson's wish‐fulfilling dream. This interpretation maintains that Laura is in fact dead, has been murdered, and that her existence in the second half of the film is the result of McPherson's unconscious desire made visual. He has fallen in love with the woman in the portrait, much like Dr. Wanley fell in love with the portrait of Alice in Fritz Lang's noir twist film The Woman in the Window from the same year. Late one night while searching Laura's apartment for clues, Det. McPherson falls asleep and dreams her alive and himself the hero with whom she falls in love. Unlike The Woman in the Window, however, there is no overt signaling in the editing or mise en scène that demarcates the diegesis as McPherson's dream. The film's denouement does not show McPherson waking up, upset that it was all a dream. It simply concludes with the arrest of Lydecker as the murderer and McPherson and Laura united to live happily ever after without any external encumbrances. Even though it need not be argued that McPherson clearly drank too much and is indeed shown falling asleep in Laura's apartment the night of her mysterious return, it still has to be argued that the second half of the narrative represents McPherson's dream because the film only provides circumstantial evidence of this textual twist. There are, however, over a dozen dialogical references to dreaming and fantasy scattered throughout the narrative that verify the possibility of this alternative fabulous story.8 During a scene just before McPherson falls asleep in Laura's apartment—the nap that ends with the return of Laura—Lydecker asks the detective, “Have you ever dreamed of Laura as your wife?” an obvious prompt for the dream. At another point in the film, Lydecker also accuses McPherson of needing “photographic evidence of his dreams,” an obvious meta‐textual allusion to the second half of Preminger's film. Lydecker also pleads to Laura that McPherson is “incapable of any normal, warm, human relationship,” ostensibly because he is a cold, calculating, overly rational detective but less ostensibly because he prefers a dream girl over a real woman. From his radio playback recording that concludes the film, Lydecker's final words in the film “closes within a dream” both describe and enact the film's denouement. From a readerly perspective, Lydecker's quips are easily discounted as the jealous ramblings of a nonrequited lover. However, these references to dreaming and fantasy states, along with the numerous others scattered throughout the film, can also be understood as the details that do not add up to the closed, codified, and accepted story, as well as pointing to a more fabulous story suppressed by the ostensible one. If classified under the writerly mode, then the twist in Laura is that the titular character is a character in McPherson's dream and that the second half of the film's diegesis takes place in McPherson's unconscious. The twist here has to be one that emerges in the viewer's interaction with the film as text, as a surplus of authorial control, since it is nowhere to be specifically located in the film itself, except through circumstantial evidence. The contingent discourse material indicated here opens the possibility for this fabulous story without directly demarcating it. This possible story is implicitly sanctioned by the film's discourse without explicitly authorizing it. The fabulous story is both only subtly constrained and implicitly sustained by the discourse details, details that can be made to signify an alternative story from the obvious one spoon‐fed to the passive spectator. This fabulous story, however, also functions to undermine the typical and ostensible Hollywood ending and manages to create a completely different diegesis, as do all twist narratives. It essentially makes even the supposed twist revelation both unreliable and ambiguous. Ultimately, Laura’s mode of narration maintains both of its twisted narrative tiers as possible stories, rather than eliminating one in favor of another. The more fabulous story, however, puts the explicit/received narrative in question. The received story is based on treating the film as a “work,” whereas the fabulous story is, of course, the result of treating the film as “text,” without stretching its story beyond an evidentiary narrative trajectory. This writerly‐mode twist is also insightfully highlighted in the difference between the theatrical release of Blade Runner from 1982 and Ridley Scott's “Director's Cut” from 1992. In the 1992 “Director's Cut,” the happy ending and Deckard's noir voice‐over narration were dropped, and Deckard's brief dream/fantasy sequence of a unicorn was added to better approximate Scott's original vision for the film. Rather than using the escapist ending from the original release, the 1992 version relies on a rather elliptical substitute of a daydream. The “Director's Cut,” therefore, explicitly reveals its more or less obvious readerly‐mode twist at the very end when Deckard finds Gaff's unicorn origami figure outside his apartment door, indicating that the Tyrell Corporation implanted Deckard's unicorn fantasy into his artificial memory. Through this narrative twist, Scott's version ends by letting the viewer know that Deckard the blade runner, the hunter of replicants, is, paradoxically, himself a replicant. In the original version, there is no unicorn daydream, so the origami unicorn at the finale merely informs Deckard that Gaff had visited his apartment when he was absent, without the added twist the viewer gets in the “Director's Cut.” However, once the 1992 version was released with its twist‐added alternative story, it retroactively turns the original theatrical release into an uncanny writerly‐mode twist film. Nowhere does the original release openly reveal Deckard's replicant status; nonetheless, the narration does imply his less‐than‐human nature throughout the film. For instance, if Rachael can be a replicant ignorant of her own replicant condition, the narration opens up the possibility that this is also true for other characters in the film, including Deckard. Oddly enough, Deckard's noir voice‐over, that which seems to make him most human, also provides evidence of his replicant status. Not only does a disembodied voice‐over often take on an uncanny status, as if the voice emanates externally, but early on Deckard complains, “Replicants weren't supposed to have feelings; neither were blade runners. What the hell was happening to me?” This complaint indirectly draws a parallel between Deckard's blade runner and possible replicant status. Furthermore, after “retiring” Zhora the replicant, Deckard starts feeling guilty about his job. Not only could his guilt have been what made him retire from the blade runner business before the start of the film, but it could also be tied to his, perhaps unconscious, knowledge of his own replicant status. When Rachael asks Deckard if he has ever taken his own replicant‐identification exam, the viewer should speculate that he may indeed fail. At the end, when replicant Roy Batty is chasing him through the Bradbury building, he quips to Deckard, “Quite an experience to live in fear. That's what it is to be a slave.” This comment presumably intimates that Deckard's job as a blade runner and a natural enemy of replicants puts him in a position of slavery to his overlord, the tyrannical Tyrell Corporation, but it also opens up the possibility that Deckard is as much a slave to Tyrell as Roy because the Tyrell Corporation actually utilizes specially programmed replicants as blade runners. Once the 1992 version reared its head, it opened up many embryonic implications in the original that could only have initially materialized through the perceptive viewer's willingness to comprehend the film's writerly twist, and it exposed the original's fabulous story and potentially writerly discourse. The “Director's Cut” had the surplus consequence of restructuring the signifying potential of these details of the original version, creating an unconscious doubling of the story. If a viewer were told upon viewing Johnathan Glazer's Sexy Beast that it is a twist film, he or she would most likely be unsatisfied with the film's overtly perceived twist because it is exposed too abruptly. Two‐thirds of the way through the film, when Don returns from the airport and threatens Gal to show up in London tomorrow upon threat of death, the film cuts to a grayed image of the Grovener Hotel in London, indicating that Gil capitulated to Don's ultimatum. But during Gil's few days in London, as he works with Teddy Bass's heist crew, the viewer is treated to objective flashbacks of Dee Dee shooting Don with a shotgun, Gal, Aitch, and Jackie beating Don to a pulp, and the subsequent burial of Don's corpse below the swimming pool of Gal's Spanish hacienda. Gal's capitulation to Don's demand, it turns out, was only a narrative ruse. He actually shows up in London in order to thwart suspicion on himself as having anything to do with Don's disappearance. The viewer's hypothetical lack of satisfaction stems from the fact that the flashbacks only follow the edit to the London hotel by a mere fifteen minutes. The twist is revealed almost as soon as it is enacted. However, this readerly‐mode twist is overshadowed by the writerly‐mode twist only implied within the film's narrative but noticeable because the film has called attention to its own constructedness. The film ends with an impossible tracking shot that moves under the pool, through the tunneled earth, to a dead and buried Don casually smoking a cigarette in his busted‐open sarcophagus. The ending implies that Don was never really a sentient being like Gal or Aitch but rather a part of Gal that needed to be dealt with and buried away before he could finally settle into his retirement with his new wife Dee Dee in sunny Spain. Once this oblique doppelgänger interpretation is breached, the film seems to emit abundant circumstantial evidence of the allegorical nature of the film's narrative. At the beginning, while lounging pool side, Gal, talking to himself, says, “fantastic, fan‐double‐dozy‐tastic,” opening up the space for his own fantastic double to enter the narrative and for the fantastic doubling of the narrative itself. Immediately after, the camera cuts to a point‐of‐view shot of a large boulder rolling down the hill behind Gal's hacienda, eventually just missing Gal and ruining his swimming pool, an obvious sign of his restless relation to his retirement. The point‐of‐view shot of the boulder personifies and subjectivizes the inanimate object as a hyperbole for Gal's own dissatisfaction with his new sedentary lifestyle. The boulder eventually lands in the swimming pool, splitting the two hearts tiled on the pool's floor. On one level the two hearts represent Gal and Dee Dee, which Gal's old criminal desires have reemerged to separate. On another level, they signify how Gal's heart is torn between Dee Dee and the criminal propensities of his old life. To extend the metaphor, Don's entrance into the film is about as violent and destructive as the boulder. Also, whenever Gal tries to deny Don's request to turn back to the criminal life, he never speaks to Don directly, ostensibly out of fear but potentially because he is merely trying to convince himself. At a bar one night, the mise en scène shows Don full frontal sitting next to Gal, whose back is fully turned to the camera, a proxemic pattern that implies an underlying doppelgänger motif running through the film's narration. Even when Gal finally does return to London to resume his criminal life, the nondiegetic music that so far has been reserved as Don's leitmotif is now used for Gal, indicating the intimate over‐proximity of the two characters. As the viewer reexamines the film, this twist—the fact that Don is merely Gal's suppressed criminal desire—becomes more and more viable. However, the film only implies this twist, relying on the astute observation of the viewer to bring this buried “fan‐double‐dozy‐tastic,” alternative story out of its sarcophagus. Because the film's ostensible twist has revealed the constructedness of its narrative and has pushed the spectator to scrutinize the discourse details, the discerning spectator is free to recognize the various incongruent signifiers that point to another, barely signifying, story. This method of interpretation embraces the seemingly obtuse details as potentially curving the narration off the course of its ostensible narrative track. The twist in the narration also reveals to the discerning spectator how films are able to house two mutually exclusive stories. IV. It's All in the “Obtuse” Details David Koepp's Secret Window may make the fabulous doppelgänger twist of Sexy Beast blatant, but it also harbors its own fantastic twist that twists its narration into a writerly‐mode twist that doubles its story. The ostensible, codified twist occurs near the end of the film when the viewer discovers that John Shooter is not really some stranger from Mississippi accusing the author Morton Rainey (the film's protagonist) of plagiarism but actually Rainey's own double, a sort of super‐egoic figure indirectly hounding himself about his dissolving marriage and past possible plagiarisms. Shooter's name is even revealed to be a pun on “shoot her,” internal instructions for what Rainey, as Shooter, needs to do: kill his unfaithful wife. This readerly‐mode twist is creatively foreshadowed in the opening tracking shot at Rainey's lake cabin. The shot tracks from outdoors through the secret window in the cabin's loft, over the banister toward the first floor, and ultimately, into a mirror image of Rainey on the couch. The camera actually enters the mirror in this opening scene and spends the entire film in this reflection of reality, indicating something fictive about the narrative from the start and indicating that the titular window is an opening into Rainey's and the narrator's secret. This secret transference to a subjectively inflected narration is oddly both marked and unmarked, both transparent and nontransparent, like a secret window. As with most readerly‐twist films, the eventual explicit twist in the narrative is foreshadowed in tiny details throughout the film, details that only reveal their significance through subsequent viewing. For instance, the doppelgänger twist is intimated through various less‐than‐obvious details that visually illustrate Elsaesser's “image which contains figures … which cannot be identified at first glance” (Elsaesser 2009, 40). Early in the film, Koepp provides a close‐up shot of Morton's car license plate. The license plate's number (CTO 27Q) provides the number “2,” foreshadowing the doubled‐nature of the film's protagonist. In addition, the “2” is also doubled within the plate's number through the pun on “TO.” Later, Koepp reinforces this doubling when he provides a twin close‐up shot of Shooter's license plate number (E2R8Q52), which also includes a duplication of the number 2. Morton's drink of choice and choice of cigarette also provides a certain overdetermined relation to the film's latent doppelgänger theme. The soda Mountain Dew contains a pun on deux, French for two, and Morton smokes Pall Mall cigarettes, whose brand name itself contains a near doubling of signifiers. Why explicitly draw attention to these details unless to thinly foreshadow the twist or, perhaps, to mock the spectator? If looked at awry, the keen‐eyed spectator might also notice the copy of Tom Robbins's novel Villa Incognito resting on the fireplace mantle, a book not only about a shape shifter but whose very title draws an uncanny parallel to Morton's cabin of his mind. Robbins's book's very presence draws a meta‐fictional allusion. Keopp is providing details signaling another, latent story lying beneath the supposed false narrative which the unsuspecting spectator is constructing. However, sometimes some less signifying and more obtuse details of a film's narrative can undermine the director's intentions by creating a surplus in significance, leading to an implied writerly twist underlying the more obvious readerly‐mode twist. After all, once the discourse retroactively yields insignificant details that take on a signification not originally recognized, further obtuse details can emerge to support an additional latent story not specifically supported but also not denied by the discourse. At the end of the film, for instance, when Johnny Depp's character enters the small grocery store and purchases, among other things, a carton of salt, the viewer is invited to notice that the brand of salt (Morton) and the famous image on the packaging (girl with umbrella on a rainy day) uncannily resembles Depp's character's name Morton Rainey. This seemingly unmotivated detail of the mise en scène provokes the viewer to conclude that the entire film's terrifying adventures did not actually happen to the writer Morton Rainey but to Morton Rainey, a fictional character in one of the protagonist's stories. Morton Rainey is as much a character in the protagonist's short story as Morton Rainey is a character in Stephen King's short story, from which the film is adapted. This self‐reflective element in the film's mise en scène implies that Morton Rainey is itself a made‐up name for a fictional character, following the basic motif of François Ozon's 2003 twist film Swimming Pool.9 In the final scene, up in the cabin's loft, Rainey exclaims to the sheriff, “the only thing that matters is the ending. It's the most important part.” Presumably, Rainey is referring to his getting away with triple homicide in the end, or, perhaps, he is meta‐textually referring to the doppelgänger twist to the film's narrative that has just been revealed. As Rainey makes this claim, however, he ostensibly points to his laptop and the supposed story on its screen. But positioned directly adjacent and on the same visual plane as the computer sits the Morton salt carton with its familiar rainy image, thus allowing the possibility that Rainey is actually pointing to the salt container while discussing the importance of the ending. He is, perhaps, pointing to the importance of the Morton salt carton for a proper understanding of the ending of the film rather than the story within the film, making the salt carton uncannily both a diegetic and a nondiegetic object simultaneously. The final staging here reveals a textual twist that the entire film is merely a story in the protagonist's imagination, that none of the narrated activity actually took place anywhere but on the computer screen, including the narration's ostensible doppelgänger twist. Once a spectator recognizes the ostensible twist that reveals the film's latent doppelgänger story, it is not too difficult for the spectator to recognize signs for the even more fabulous story revealed by the film's writerly twist. For instance, Morton's early discussion about pseudonyms with Mrs. Garvey, complete with Morton's denial of his reliance on them (remembering, of course, that there is no negation in the unconscious), draws attention to Morton Rainey's name. Taken out of context in the search for the nearly true fabulous fabula, this discussion carries the implication that Morton's name is itself a fiction within the fiction. Thus far I have focused exclusively on films that carry an intentional twist in their narrative primarily because their self‐conscious revealing of the constructedness of their discourse and their staging of a doubled story provoke the spectator to further scrutinize the film's obtuse details that might signify otherwise. Nonetheless, because they promote this type of spectator scrutiny, twist films also, I would argue, help spectators locate a hidden, writerly twist in films that would never be explicitly categorized as twist films. Films like Martin Scorsese's 1991 Cape Fear and Peter Medak's 1993 Romeo Is Bleeding utilize a narrative framing device that imply a writerly twist in their mode of narration without any appearance of a more obvious twist within their storylines. Cape Fear begins and ends with Danielle Bowden in front of a schoolroom chalkboard talking about her terrifying adventure from the previous summer, making the entire narrative of the film potentially appear as just the product of the hyperbolic imagination of an adolescent student trying too hard to impress her schoolmates with her “What I Did Last Summer” assignment. Likewise, Romeo Is Bleeding begins and ends with Jim Doherty telling the noirish adventures of his past self Jack Grimaldi. The astute viewer could surmise by the third‐person, highly self‐conscious voice‐over narrator, complete with several flashy proleptic sequences, that Jack Grimaldi's story is merely some sort of pulp fiction that Doherty imagines up, or reads, while counteracting the boredom of his isolated life in an empty diner in the middle of nowhere. The Holiday Diner bookending of the narrative implies that the entire story of Jack exists on a more fabulous plane than the mundane reality of Jim, as implied in Jim's delusional mindset, concluding with several internally focalized hallucinations. The name of Jim's diner itself associates his adventures with a reprieve from reality. On the ostensible level, Jim is merely lying low, preventing his past troubles from finding him. On a more fabulous level, reading the signifier “holiday” vertically, rather than strictly horizontally along the narrative axis, signifies metaphorically that, out of shear boredom, Jim has imagined (or read) an outlandish noir tale, overidentifying with the fabricated protagonist. Likewise, the hole that Jack feeds to keep happy—the motif of his outlandish behavior—could be understood metaphorically as the hole in Jim's existence, the emptiness of his life out in the desert.10 As writerly‐twist films, both Cape Fear and Romeo Is Bleeding work off the same motif as Secret Window: fictional narratives only implying the fictional status of their own diegetic realty. But in neither of these films is a twist explicitly provided, and they indicate how a personal narration in cinema need not always be embedded within a larger discourse of impersonal narration. Without an anonymous Er‐form narrator, with only the Ich‐form character's discourse, the twist will only emerge in the interpretive process.11 It only appears, in other words, if the spectator takes a scandalous look at the film's narrative details, looking for what sticks out and curves the space of an otherwise relatively straightforward narration in order to expose a second‐tier narrative, potentially revealing a completely different and contradictory story. Only if the spectator realizes that a different organization of the separate details allows different figures to be recognized, then will he or she allow a suppressed fabulous story to emerge. The readerly mode of the twist film only pretends to open up the possibility for a deviant cinematic narrative because it eventually eschews its own narrative enjoyment, ultimately producing an obvious, easily produced and consumed story. Once the second correct story is constrained by the added twisted discourse material, twist films are really not substantially different than non‐twist films. However, the twisted construction of its narrative indirectly encourages the evaluative method of the astute spectator that reveals the twisted narrative in ostensibly straightforward cinematic narratives, much in the way the director's cut of Blade Runner allows the spectator to look at the original's narration awry and see the fabulous, only implied, twist. The rerelease's overt twist actually transforms the original into the type of writerly narrative that remains plural and ambiguous. It is these writerly‐twist films that present us “with fictional worlds whose existence is ambiguous, problematic, indefinite. These worlds are neither authentic, nor non‐authentic, but create an indeterminate space between fictional existence and fictional non‐existence” (Doležel 1980, 23), especially since they are not explicitly sanctioned by the film itself. It is this writerly mode and only this mode of twist narration that keeps the field of desire unencumbered by a closed story, that releases spectator desire from an overdetermined object, that swerves from the codified understanding, that opens up to the nearly true and the fabulous, and that, thereby, remains a potentially deviant mode of cinematic narration.12 FILMOGRAPHY Blade Runner. 1982 , 1992. Directed by Ridley Scott The Boss of It All. 2006 . Directed by Lars von Trier The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 1920 . Directed by Robert Weine Cape Fear. 1991 . Directed by Martin Scorsese Laura. 1944 . Directed by Otto Preminger Romeo Is Bleeding. 1993 . Directed by Peter Medak Secret Window. 2004 . Directed by David Koepp Sexy Beast. 2000 . Directed by Jonathan Glazer Swimming Pool. 2003 . Directed by François Ozon The Usual Suspects. 1995 . Directed by Bryan Singer REFERENCES Anderson , Emily R. 2010 . “ Telling Stories: Unreliable Discourse, Fight Club, and the Cinematic Narrator .” Journal of Narrative Theory 40 : 80 – 107 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Barthes , Roland . 1974 . S/Z: An Essay . Translated by Richard Miller. New York : Hill and Wang . Barthes , Roland . 1975 . The Pleasure of the Text . Translated by Richard Miller. New York : Hill and Wang . Barthes , Roland . 1977 . Image, Music, Text . Translated by Stephen Heath. London : Fontana Press . Barthes , Roland . 1982 . Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Translated by Richard Howard. New York : Hill and Wang . Barthes , Roland . 1984 . The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 . Translated by Linda Coverdale. Northwestern University Press . Barthes , Roland . 1986 . The Rustle of Language . Translated by Richard Howard. New York : Hill and Wang . Bordwell , David . 2002 . “ Film Futures .” SubStance 31 : 88 – 104 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Branigan , Edward . 2002 . “ Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking Interpretations: A Response to David Bordwell's Film Futures. ’” SubStance 31 : 105 – 114 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Brown , Mark . 2006 . “ Lookey Here: Lars von Trier Is at It Again .” The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/08/filmnews.film. OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Buckland , Warren , ed. 2009 . Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema . Malden, MA : Wiley‐Blackwell . Cossar , Harper . 2009 . “ ‘Wait, How Did I Miss That?’: Understanding the ‘Twist’ in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window .” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 26 : 10 – 19 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Culler , Jonathan . 1980 . “ Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative .” Poetics Today 1 : 27 – 37 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Currie , Gregory . 1995 . “ Unreliability Refigured: Narrative in Literature and Film .” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 : 19 – 29 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Doležel , Lubomir . 1980 . “ Truth and Authenticity in Narrative .” Poetics Today 1 : 7 – 25 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Elsaesser , Thomas . 2009 . “ The Mind‐Game Film .” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema , edited by Warren Buckland. 13 – 41 . Malden, MA : Wiley‐Blackwell . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Hill , Leslie . 2010 . Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism . Notre Dame University Press . Johnston , Sheila . 2008 . “Lars Von Trier's Funny Turn.” The Telegraph. Feb. 22. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/3671331/Lars-Von-Triers-funny-turn.html. Klecker , Cornelia . 2013 . “ Mind‐Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and Art‐Cinema Narration .” Poetics Today 34 : 119 – 146 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Kristeva , Julia . 1984 . Revolution in Poetic Language . Translated by Margaret Waller. Columbia University Press . Lavik , Erlend . 2006 . “ Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in ‘Twist Movies ’? The Velvet Light Trap 58 : 55 – 64 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Lemon , Lee , and Marion Reis. 1965 . Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays . University of Nebraska Press . Neupert , Richard . 1995 . The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema . Wayne State University Press . Oxman , Elena . 2010 . “ Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual .” SubStance 39 . 2 : 71 – 90 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Polan , Dana . 1981 . “ Roland Barthes and the Moving Image .” October 18 : 41 – 46 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Ramirez Berg , Charles . 2009 . “ A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the ‘Tarantino Effect.’ ” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema , edited by Warren Buckland, 5 – 61 . Malden, MA : Wiley‐Blackwell . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Ray , Robert B. 1995 . The Avant‐Garde Finds Andy Hardy . Harvard University Press . Richter , David H. 2005 . “ Your Cheatin’ Art: Double Dealing in Cinematic Narrative .” Narrative 13 : 11 – 28 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Shen , Dan . 2005 . “ Why Contextual and Formal Narratologies Need Each Other .” Journal of Narrative Theory 35 : 141 – 171 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Staiger , Janet , ed. 2006 . “ Special Double Issue on Complex Narratives .” Film Criticism 31 : 1 – 2 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Thompson , Kristin . 1988 . Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis . Princeton University Press . Wilson , George M. 2006 . “ Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film .” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 : 81 – 95 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Zerweck , Bruno . 2001 . “ Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction .” Style 35 : 151 – 178 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Footnotes 1. Some of the more recognizable recent twist/puzzle films: The Crying Game (1992), 1995 The Usual Suspects (1995), Lola rennt (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Fight Club (1999), and Femme Fatale (2002). For some of the more noteworthy recent critical accounts, see Anderson (2010), Bordwell (2002), Cossar (2009), Currie (1995), Klecker (2013), Lavik (2006), Richter (2005), Wilson (2006), and Zerweck (2001). There has also been a double issue of the journal Film Criticism devoted to “complex narrative” in cinema; see Staiger (2006). In addition, there is also at least one collection of essays devoted to the examination of puzzle films: Buckland (2009). For a fairly thorough taxonomy of the twist/puzzle film, see Ramirez Berg (2009). 2. Syuzhet and fabula are the Russian Formalist terms used by Boris Tomashevsky to denote “plot” and “story.” The former refers to the means by which a story is communicated, and the latter refers to the complete content of the story that is put together by the viewer from the given plot material. French structuralism uses “discourse” instead of plot, and I follow suit throughout this article since “discourse” is the preferred term of narrative theory. I also often use “narration” and “narrative” as near synonyms for “discourse” and “story” throughout the article when wanting to be more precise narratologically (narration = the act of telling and/or monstrating; narrative = the ultimate story that is told and/or shown). For the Russian Formalist distinction, see Lemon and Reis (1965, 68). 3. Unfortunately, these lookeys were added in postproduction only to the Danish release of the film. They also do not appear on the DVD edition of the film, making it now difficult for most viewers to access. However, von Trier has maintained that these lookeys appear “for the casual observer” as “a glitch or a mistake. For the initiated, it's a riddle to be solved. All lookeys,” he adds, “can be decoded by a system that is unique” (quoted in Brown 2006). Unique to the individual desire of the spectator, I presume. Brown adds that these lookeys possess the added disadvantage that some viewers will be distracted from following the film's narrative itself (Brown 2006). 4. Forking‐path films include Blind Chance (1987), The Double Life of Veronique (1991), Lost Highway (1997), Sliding Doors (1998), Lola rennt (1998), Melinda and Melinda (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Mr. Nobody (2009), and the like. In these films two or more alternate, possible, and mutually exclusive worlds are shown as if both or all happen. For a taxonomy of the characteristics of this type of film, see Bordwell (2002). 5. For a good discussion of the relation between formal and contextual narrative interpretation, see Shen (2005). 6. Dana Polan argues that a “third meaning” in Barthes's sense emerges “when one refuses the way in which the narrative flow converts signifiers into inescapable signifieds” (1981, 42). This refusal process is concerned with recognizing the signifiance of a text, a concept Barthes borrows from his one time student Julia Kristeva (1984, 17). 7. Elena Oxman argues that Barthes's notion of taking a “scandalous look” at the filmic image is about, in Barthes's words, producing a “vacillation of meaning” and recognizing the “subtlety of sense” in an image. She further contends that in Barthes's critical practice there is “a certain ‘fissuring’ of meaning as the necessary critical tactic” that functions to advocate for what lies beyond received meaning (Oxman 2010, 86). 8. In Kristin Thompson's close analysis of the film, she recognizes a number of these references to dreams and dreaming scattered throughout the film, suggesting narrative duplicity (1988, 172). 9. Both Swimming Pool and Secret Window share their title with the title of a fictional work within the diegetic reality of the narrative, implying that the film is only a fictional story. Unlike The Secret Window, Swimming Pool explicitly reveals this twist at the narration's end. 10. During the film, Jim's voice‐over narration is often shown competing with Jack's embedded voice‐over. 11. Jim's voice‐over from the Arizona desert can be understood as the Er narrator to Jack's New York Ich‐form narrator. However, through the logic developed here, Jim's narration is also an Ich‐form narration as the Er‐form narration, rendering its reliability suspect. 12. This article has benefited greatly from the insightful comments of the anonymous reviewers, the editors of this journal, and the students in my Film and Narrative Theory course. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - Inviting a Scandalous Look: Detecting the Fabulous Fabula Promoted by the Twist Film
JF - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12372
DA - 2017-04-26
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VL - 75
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DP - DeepDyve
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