hi mike,
thanks for putting on your skates and venturing out onto the ice - it sure is 
slippery out here, but i genuinely appreciate the company.

"unreliability refers to... philosophical problems about the way texts work  but 
it can also exist as a purely narratological feature"

while i do comprehend your spinning coin of narratology/philosophy i would 
probably put me on the banding around its circumference rather than on its 
philosophical face, at least for this discussion. as regards the distinction itself 
well, i have always interpreted narratology as something which does concern 
itself very much "with the ways texts work". i don't really think of there being 
any significant structural divide here. i suspect that it is the philosophical 
nature of certain modes of inquiry which encourage the illusion of distance.

"a film, through the use of conventional markers and codes, identifies a 
sequence as the dream of a character, the reliability of the content of that 
dream is called into question by the film itself, while the film's assertion of that 
unreliability is itself not called into question" 

yeah i get that: within any given narrative as soon as we have 1+n diegetic 
truths and one of them is presented as primary/authentic then we have 
unreliability.

"within conventional narratology unreliability is [more or less] reliably marked"

well now you see that's what i thought! phew! however, apparently if it's too 
common or too obvious (too minor or major) then it's not unreliable. do you 
understand why? according to this notion, when the unreliability is reliable it's 
no longer unreliable and the concept bankrupts itself. i don't follow that and 
you might, yes? furthermore, this notion is somehow related to the essential 
presence of a 'backdrop of realism'. this is still a real conundrum and doesn't 
make much sense to me. if the realism is merely a veil or backdrop then surely 
it is no longer realism? the only thing i can imagine that these ideas in this 
version of unreliability are trying to mean is that unreliability is discernible if 
the majority of a film misleads the audience into interpreting a diegetic 
unreality as truth until a narrative shift/twist demotes it to unreliable, the 
example par excellence being "the 6th sense". 

my problem with this is how is this not the definition of every well-crafted 
thriller ever made? how many ice picks under the bed or typewriters in the 
cupboard or whatever the key prop of the murderer was  that the wife finds 
to reveal that the husband was the killer all along fit perfectly into this idea? 
sure, it is exactly what happens in shyamalan's film - a sustained and 
controlled release of narrative information except for the detail that shifts our 
perspective to reveal the truth - but there is nothing uncommon or rarified or 
exotic about this structure. it is extremely common - the protagonist puts all 
the pieces together expressed through a rapid montage and hey presto we 
learn the truth. my interpretation of unreliability makes no departure from 
mainstream traditional filmic devices which have been around for a long time. 
yet there is apparently a surge in the 90's which signals something new. so far 
it has just been named 'something' and it has no relevance to any comparable 
literary traditions and whatever it is, when it's common it's no longer 
unreliable. there is almost a genre but not quite because if there were it would 
be meaningless. all very intriguing, not very useful. (perhaps we are 
unconsciously rehearsing a future discussion about the postclassical?)

how many court room dramas show us supposedly authentic flashbacks of 
conflicting testimonies out of which we can't discern the 'true truth' until the 
film reveals it? there are innumerable horror films that have false endings and 
sub-plots, the return of the repressed is a staple narrative device; and the 
countless science fiction films with time travelling and parallel realities and all 
that jazz... surely narratological praxis intends to include these in any notion 
of unreliability?

to my way of thinking you can't have your not-too-hot-not-too-cold bowl of 
porridge and eat it too. having said that, your characterisation of unreliability 
squarely reflects my own, mike, and i value your efforts to clear up the 
ambiguities. many thanks.

brooke

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