A quick reply: I think there's a difference between the ironic affect of the
narrator (Alex) in _Clockwork Orange_ and the more profound deceptions, or
baldfaced lies, that we find in some of the other examples mentioned. The images
in Kubrick's film serve (at least, to my mind) to throw Alex's commentary into a
kind of satirical relief, and while this does de-sensitive us to the film's
violence, I don't see that as the result of any structure of deception.
Perhaps someone else will endeavor to analyze this structure, but two points of
departure seem interesting here. The first, which someone else noted, lies in
the literary angle of deception, which is different by nature but still sheds
light on ciematic representation. The great literary unreliable narrator's--I'm
thinking of Christie's Murder of Roger Akroyd, any number of Henry James'
narrators, the narrator of The Good Soldier, Jay Gatsby (thouhg the narrative is
reported), etc.--can withold critical facts, manipulate reality as such, and
contradict themselves or even contradict what we later learn, in some
provisional way, to be the truth.
But in a certain sense, what this structur depends upon is the pretense of a
first person narrator, something that the cinema (notwithstanding some wonderful
experiments in subjectivism) does not strusturally possess. In the spirit of
free indirect discourse, we could say that the cinematic image--the essential
"there is" of the image--is capable of lending itself to subjective expression,
from the specificity of point of view shots to the vagues sense of focalization,
and the latter seems to characterize a numebr of examples (e.g., Usual Suspects,
6th Sense) where we learn some trutht at the end of the film and then
retroactively re-read the plot. But for me the more interesting facility of the
cinema (the other poitn of departure) lies in the immediate cinematic
relationship between image and word, such that it's possible for a given
charatcer to lie in the face of a truth that we, as witnesses of the image, know
to be such. Even more intriguing, it's possible for a narrator--a non-digetic
voice--to seemingly contradict the image itself (Hiroshima Mon Amoura: "You
Never Saw..."). This last example is, needless to say, so very rich and
complicated that it can't be done justice by this description. My point is only
that the cinema's capacity to lie sometimes comes down to: ceci n'est pas une
pipe...
Gregg Flaxman
Univerisyt of North Carolina, Chapel Hil
Quoting "Shaw, Dan" <[log in to unmask]>:
> As someone has already pointed out, but failed to elaborate on,
> Little Alex in Clockwork is the archetypal unreliable narrator, in both the
> film and the book. Crucial to securing our sympathy for the little monster,
> he addresses the audience as friends and himself as humble, and putting an
> altogether winning twist on his crimes. Along with the aestheticization of
> violence in the film, his voice allows us to enjoy his ultraviolence.
>
> Patrick Bateman in American Psycho is a unique case, for he is
> unreliable to himself as well as to the audience. He can't distinguish
> reality from hallucination, and, as a result, neither can we.
>
> Dan
>
and in the
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