Stranger than Fiction

Says who? And why not? It doesn’t have to be a particularly ‘experimental’ film in any other sense. Where does your conviction that “we” don’t need contradictory narratives come from?

I'm not saying that, because I'm far from a storytelling purist. While I understand those that put story above all else feel this way, I'm contradicting that general argument, because I personally think storytelling is more of a cancer than a virtue for filmmaking. The rest of my post should make it clear I am deeply against the general sentiment that everything in a story needs to 'add up' or resolve or avoid being contradictory. This is because I am stridently against any boxing in of an artist's impulses. Period. Especially in instances where those impulses pull them away from any need to make clear and perfect sense. They should just go for it. Because clear and perfect sense holds absolutely no traction with me.

Sorry, you’re quite right. I must have not read that properly as I’m still being pulled in all directions. For something that’s in itself artificial, the idea of storytelling has certainly come to command undue influence.

Inform me about this “Hereditary” you speak of.

I’m unaware.

Hereditary was a helpful example because it was a recent discussion, that’s all. It’s a multifaceted issue. I remember speaking to an acquaintance, a publisher, a few months ago about a particular ‘optimistic’ scene in The Tattooist of Auschwitz (the book), and the ‘happy ending’ which really jars.

And he said, Oh, you can’t discuss human behaviour in this book, or its ending, because it takes place in such extreme circumstances that we suspend disbelief merely out of respect and shock. And I thought, Well, extreme, so what? Does that mean these emotions and actions aren’t legitimate?

I am aware I’m not communicating precisely what concerns me about this. I guess to me, the contradictions and inconsistencies in human behaviour are the most exciting thing in the world, they make life worth living, so it’s my instinct to seek them out and observe them, rather than smooth them over.

As someone who has used art to acclimatize myself to a world I clearly don't understand, the notion of sanding off all of the confounding elements of how we get through life is basically heretical to me. Narrative art has its place, but so does art that understands the nuisance of such artifice.

I'd say that there's no one universal standard that can be established for when it's okay for a character's behavior to be inconsistent or not make sense in a movie, versus when that's a problem instead. I mean, on the one hand, movies are obviously a reflection of reality, and reality very often doesn't "make sense", but at the same time, movies are also artificially constructed narratives, made up of countless different major and minor creative decisions, decisions that are made for one reason or another, and of course, it's always possible to make the wrong decisions when creating a work of art, so it should all be taken on a case-by-case basis.

To offer up a single example (and in the interest of giving Hermehditary a break for once), I'd say that the climax of The Searchers is a good example of when it's valid to criticize a character's behavior as being inconsistent, when it comes to Ethan's decision to...

I see art, fiction, as a modelling of life, a reduction to something that can be grasped, that can make sense, that can be transparent, with its parameters and its chaotic factors trimmed down. A self-contained story, reassuring because of its meaning and cohesion. A very distorted mirror of a reality in which we wish for some sense and try -and fail- to build it.

That's what almost all art is, that's what makes its success. And given how much art shapes our communication, filters our worldviews, defines our "knowledge" ("hey, I know how the Inuits/Indians/Romans lived, I saw it in a movie"), it's what we end up believing it : it shapes our expectations of the world. It's not just a westerner thing. All myths serve this purpose. Simple stories that highlight the codes and structures of society, the ideal behaviors, the transgressive ones, the mental categories and divides (us/them, nature/culture, man/woman, family/stranger, etc).

What I'm saying is that fictions don't reflect life. They're not even isolated laboratory experiments. They're postulates on isolated aspects, that, in life, can never be taken in isolation. It's the stick figures that represent biological bodies.

But art is also reflexive and experimental, and artists like to push its boundaries ("aha, art is this? then you'll see how far beyond I'll go"). So of course, you'll have all sorts of contrarian experiments exploring its freedoms. But they stay at the fringe. The define it by reinforcing its borders. What "works" (more objectively : what is successful and popular at large), is what denies the chaos of life, what strips is down of all the absurdity that would make a fiction (ironically) "unbelievable", unsatisfactory or impossible to follow.

We function by reductions. By bite-sized takes that our brains can manipulate. Fictions reflect this. Our brain is in control of what happens in them. In front of life, we're disarmed.

Definitely agree that it can just “not work” or end up being the wrong decision, but originally when I started this thread, I had a sort of existential consideration in mind.

I think there are quite a few examples when a film attempts to portray properly “extreme”, outlandish behaviour and ends up being less convincing for that, as with WAZ.

Narratives like Hannibal explore, among other things, inherently irrational attachments some people can have to one another, and that’s one of the main reasons I love it. . I know I’m repeating myself, but I just think there’s a tendency to miss out a huge chunk of the human experience because “it isn’t consistent”/“doesn’t make sense”. 9/11 didn’t “make sense” either.

There’s no denying that people tend to organise reality into supposedly “chronological”/“sequential” chunks to process it, even the idea of space-time is a fact of human perception, rather than an independently existing factor, but that doesn’t mean it’s a “must”.

It’s just that I hear it so often from both amateurs and people who have definitely seen enough to know better: “Oh, it makes narrative sense , oh, , and so on. The latter is actually a good example, because of course it is entirely bloody irrational, or at least extremely impulsive, and that’s why it works!

My point is that this approach closes off narrative possibilities. I know someone who teaches a creative writing course. We all know what they’re like (the people who teach them even more so than the courses), but he’s obsessed with this idea that a character must “realise”, “grow”, “change”, all the buzz words, and when I tell him that people can regress too, for example, or, the horror, not change, his response is, “Yes, but that doesn’t belong in art/artificial narratives.”

I just don’t get where that comes from.

And, to offer up a counter-example of when it made sense for a film's characterizations to contradict itself, I'd point to Zero Dark Thirty and it's humanization of the CIA agents as being quite likeable when they're "off the clock", even though they're brutal pieces of *hit that torture people when they're on the job. I mean, for one thing, we're scrutinizing them in completely different situations, so it makes perfect sense for them to act completely differently depending on their circumstances, but more importantly, how personable they seem in their private lives doesn't feel like it was intended to get us to like them as people, and by extension, approve of everything they do (depiction doesn't equal endorsement, and all), but in order to emphasize the level of sociopathy and emotional detachment required to be turned on/off at will in order to be able to torture people for a living, while still functioning as a human being. Besides, if Bigelow was trying to endorse torture, she would've tried glossing over it more, instead of doing what she actually did, which is focus on it, which made those scenes quite uncomfortable to watch, particularly in the theater.

When it comes to coincidences in movies, do you think some movies are entertaining because of the big coincidences though, like No Way Out (1987), for example?

I didn't think that The Searchers had a false set up because:

Interesting paragraph. I must admit I really liked Jason Clarke in this movie, but what a contradictory character. We saw him having quite a decent lunch with the fellow he’d almost killed by way of torture &, of course, there’s the pivotal scene of him with his monkeys whom he obviously loved.

Chastain’s character was pretty much the same way though she had a man to inflict the blows on her torturee.

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But my problem with the climax of The Searchers isn't that Ethan had a change of heart at all; I mean, I didn't want it to end with him straight-up