Dear Members

First and foremost, I would like to take the opportunity and thank all who
replied to my query asking for films that use the device of the unreliable
narrator. I also would like to thank those who raised certain theoretical
issues. The response has been quite impressive, and I feel some vindication
for my doctoral thesis on the topic. (I am very thankful for further
suggestions, comments, filmic examples, etc., maybe off-list under
[log in to unmask])

Second, I also feel a little bit guilty for not further elaborating in the
beginning. Some of the problems can be avoided with a clear definition of
unreliable narration. Therefore, I would like to highlight some areas of
difficulty by summarizing the recent discussion:

The term “unreliable narrator” was coined in Wayne Booth’s influential 1961
study The Rhetoric of Fiction, as should be well-known. Gerald Prince, in
his Dictionary of Narratology, nicely sums up traditional definitions and
approaches: “unreliable narrator. A NARRATOR whose norms and behavior are
not in accordance with the IMPLIED AUTHOR’S norms; a narrator whose values
(tastes, judgements, moral sense) diverge from those of the implied
author’s; a narrator the reliability of whose account is undermined by
various features of that account” (Prince 1987: 101)
Recently, in the wake of a huge activity in cognitive narrative theory,
unreliable narration has been explained as a recuperation strategy: the
reader tries to resolve ambiguities, inconsistencies, etc. by attributing
them to the narrator’s unreliability.

Narratorial unreliability, therefore, requires a personal “flesh-and-blood”
narrator who can be hold “responsible.” Put differently, restricted
character-narration (The Game) is indeed a precondition, as Warren Buckland
elaborated, and unreliable narration (Fight Club) is a sub-set, one that
involves deception. Additionally, unreliable narration requires a realistic
reading. It somehow doesn’t make sense to recuperate radical postmodernist
texts, for example meta-texts or certain science fiction films, in terms of
unreliable narration, since in those texts one hardly finds a reliable
account of what actually happened. Unreliable, in literary theory, does not
mean ambiguous, opaque, weird, being late, or being Leni Riefenstahl. It
means that a personal narrator – for whatever reason, intentionally or
unintentionally – does not get the events right and therefore misleads the
recipient since we have only his or her version of the events to count on.

In film, one might argue, there is nothing akin to the homodiegetic
narrator in literature, who is most likely to be unreliable. The voice-over
is a false friend, and the depiction of subjectivity is always sandwiched
between the heterodiegetic devices of the impersonal “cinematic narrator,”
or, if one insists, the “activity of narration.” Yes and no. In the case of
Fight Club, to pick a counter-example, where from the very first second we
are confronted with a personalised narrative situation, it nonetheless
makes sense to speak of a homodiegetic narrator. We hear the narrating I,
and we see – for the most part – the experiencing I, or what the character-
narrator claims to have experienced. The bond between sound and image seems
to be very close in that case, and both sound (voice-over, subjective
sound) and image (mise-en-scene, camera movements, framing) are very
closely connected to the main character who has been promoted: it is "as
if" he was the principal storyteller. And where there is a personal
narrator, there can be an unreliable personal narrator. As Gregg Flaxman
has put it on this list, if I may quote: “we could say that the cinematic
image – the essential “there is” of the image – is capable of lending
itself to subjective expression.” Usually subjectivity is not sustained for
very long, but in some cases it is. Audiences usually don’t reward these
films, some critics do, and theoreticians tend to love ‘em.

Some sort of partial unreliability arises when what we hear seems to be at
odds with what we see. Badlands, as Andrew Kunka noted, is a case in point.
We hear Holly talking about Kit who, she claims, is always thinking about
her, we see him, well, probably not thinking about her. This is certainly
not the characteristic split of first person narratives into narrating I
and experiencing I. This seems to be something of the kind narrating I and
experiencing them (personal mode [sound] and, at the same time, impersonal
mode [images]). Therefore, since Holly is very far from being the primary
narrator of the film, I would suggest that this dramatic irony is something
different than, for example, the dramatic irony in American Psycho. In the
former, the image track seems to do all the work and provides a rather
reliable account of what happened, in the latter it is the audience who has
to single out what actually happened.

Another very interesting point that hasn’t been mentioned so far: When
adapting unreliable narratives to the screen, we often witness how the
unreliability of a literary text vanishes. Adrian Lyne’s version of Lolita,
for example, fills a lot of gaps and holes. In Nabokov’s Lolita Humbert
Humbert – in a fictional speech – defends himself against the jury. He, it
seems at times, has become the victim of Lolita. In Lyne’s version, there’s
no doubt about that, Humbert Humbert has become the victim of Lolita. She
wants him. She seduces him. Poor old college lecturer. Lyne sexes up the
dossier and makes this film a love story only by eliminating
inconsistencies. What would the jury in Nabokov’s Lolita say? And: What
would the jury in Lyne’s Lolita say? Certainly not the same thing.

I am not so quite sure whether films such as The Sixth Sense, Open Your
Eyes, or The Others are best referred to as unreliable narratives. The
Sixth Sense and The Others are ghost stories with a restricted narration
(we know as much as the protagonists which is not too much): towards the
end we find out that the fictional world is weird (the dead are alive)
and this is not thanks to a personal narrator but thanks to the fictional
world itself. Open Your Eyes is a simulation film – once again, it is not a
personal narrator who can be hold responsible but some other source.

The same goes for some of the films of David Lynch: Isn’t it a violent
reading of Lost Highway to state that it is thanks to the main character
(is he a narrator?) that we don’t know what has happened, or what is
happening? In Mulholland Drive, are we really in the head of, well, what’s
her name? Where and when does “her” “dream” “begin”? What happened Last
Year at Marienbad?

The point seems to be that unreliable narrators are one thing, and
ambiguous narratives etc. quite another. “Unreliable” is a vague term in
life, in literary theory it is not. Reliability is not an unreliable
concept, as someone else mentioned. Seminal articles from Marie-Laure Ryan
and Lubomir Dolezel, to pick only two writers, show the exact opposite. In
film theory, I can only refer to the section on film-narratology in New
Vocabularies in Film Semiotics. Structuralism, Post-structuralism and
Beyond. London: Routledge, 1992. It contains a very short chapter on
unreliability, but nonetheless it is a very good point of departure. In the
case of narratorial unreliability, I would argue, we should stick to a
narrow definition. It’s nothing bad to borrow from literary theory, they
are so incredibly precise once in a while. Otherwise every single point of
view shot, or unmarked dream sequence, flashback, you name it, could be
discussed under this heading. Psycho, Pulp Fiction, Mulholland Drive – all
of them are certainly interesting films, but none of them features an
unreliable narrator as it has been defined in literary theory.

Someone else noted that the unreliable narrator is a very slippery and very
interesting topic. I agree with the second point. Slippery it is only when
we use vague descriptions of  “unreliable” and “narrator.” It seems that
unreliable narrators in film are still very, very rare, and compared to
English-language literature (Swift, McEwan, Ishiguro, McGrath) it remains a
tiny category. As long as it remains a clear category, that’s nothing bad
at all.

Hope these brief comments could highlight some of the problems that arise
when exploring the issue of the unreliable narrator in film. It is,
nevertheless, still more tangled. Now I’ve got to watch some of the films
that have been mentioned. Once again, thanks a lot for that.

Regards,

Volker Ferenz