Crimen Falsi

I've been thinking lately about unreliability (not unreliable narration as such) in books and film. This post contains a massive spoiler for Atonement, so if you haven't read the book or seen the movie -- and really, you should read the book or see the movie, preferably reading if you have to choose but both worth doing -- I'd recommend skipping this post, or at least jumping a few paragraphs down where I start speaking in generalities once more.

Atonement isn't, properly speaking, a "twist" story -- you know, the M. Night Shyamalan style of storytelling in which the lurching mindfuck 3/4 of the way in is the engine that makes the story go. But there is a bit of a twist, and if you've managed to make it this far into the post without heeding the spoiler warnings, get ye gone here or make peace with missing out on an unsullied encounter with one of the greatest works of modern English letters. Seriously.

For the sake of discussion, I'll give some context. The scene I'm interested in comes in what I think is part 3 of the book (and is clearly part 3 of the movie, which to its credit divides just as neatly as the novel). At the end of part 2, Robbie, our male lead, has finally found a place to rest after being wounded during his flight to the British retreat-point at Dunkirk. The section closes with him drifting into unconsciousness, and the reader (by which I mean "I," at least) can be forgiven for assuming that he is off to that undiscovered country from whose bourne etc. etc. But then, after the action's shifted back to London, Briony visits her sister Cecilia, and is surprised to find Robbie in the flat as well. Due to the events of the opening section of the book, confrontation and drama ensue.

The twist, as you all know who are reading this far, is that this last scene doesn't actually happen. Briony invents it when she writes a novel around the story of Robbie, Cecilia, and herself, because she can't bear to recapitulate the reality that Robbie died at Dunkirk, as did Cecilia in an air raid. Leaving aside the compelling way this dramatizes the simultaneous power and powerlessness of art, what I'm most interested in now are the dynamics of that false scene. Because when reading the novel, I was in fact struck by a sense of falseness about it -- I wanted to believe that Cee and Robbie had gotten their version of a happy ending, but I didn't buy it, being utterly convinced that he had perished. I don't think I resolved this tension during my first read-through, but I definitely felt it, and when I discovered my instinct was right I felt a sense of rightness (and pleasure at having understood what was going on, of course).

The film, however, doesn't project this sense of falseness to nearly the same degree. Part of this is due to how section 2 is presented; Robbie's wound is shown, but the state of his health is not well-established, which makes his lapse into unconsciousness at the end far more equivocal. But there's something about how the scene itself plays out that feels too naturalistic, I suppose -- in the book, the dialogue feels more stilted, the characters don't seem to act quite like they should, and Robbie seems to hover within the scene like a ghost before crashing in and causing a stagey confrontation. The film matches the book to a great degree, as far as I can recall (I've loaned my copy to my sister, and thus lack access), but these same elements don't have quite the same effect. The characterization and dialogue similarly feel strained, but here they come off as the effect of passed time and strained, brittle emotions. And Robbie does flit about in the frame, starting off half-glimpsed, rushing, seen only in profile -- but this reads more as a tease towards the reveal that he survived Dunkirk, than as an indication of his true, phantom status.

[This marks the point at which reading becomes plausible once more for those of you sadly unfamiliar with Atonement]

In trying to figure out why the book works and the novel doesn't, obviously there are questions of craft involved. It's not as if all novels that attempt this feat succeed -- in fact, I've just finished reading a novel which didn't pull it off, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (it was bought for me as a gift, and a bit outside my usual genres of choice, for what it's worth).

In that book, an aged writer is telling the gothicized, heavily Jane-Eyre-inspired story of her life to an eager biographer; the writer's already been established as having a slippery relationship with the truth, and so the pump theoretically should be primed for the reader to expect unreliable narration. And there's a pivotal scene where something along these lines happens -- the writer is a twin, and she and her sister were raised somewhat feral by insane incestuous jazz-age aristocrats (and more usefully, by a pair of their servants). Throughout the story, the girls have been utterly indifferent to others, barely taking note of them and engaging in thoughtless cruelties. But after one of the servants dies, suddenly the writer becomes inconsolable, worries about how to set up a funeral, and has to struggle with bottling up her tears. Given the previous characterization, my eyes began to roll quite robustly at this point.

Now, there is a good reason for this emotional-affect whiplash (it's too complicated to go into in detail, and is ultimately not hugely interesting), but instead of reading it as an ambiguity or strangeness in the text, I took it as a mistake of the author's. She'd already made a few missteps -- especially a number of significant ones in the early pages of the book, including having everybody in the book sport the same idiosyncratic literary style, and making the writer the Most! Famous! Writer! Of! All! Time!, who wrote 56 bestselling novels over the past 56 years. Given that track record, attempting to underplay your twist doesn't work particularly well (I am reminded of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, which I also recently finished reading, also features a child of aristocracy mostly raised by servants, and also has a twist or two that are clued by inconsistencies in the facts that the reader thinks he knows -- difference being, the quality of the writing makes one think "there's something odd here," rather than "this book needed a better editor.")

Anyway, the point of that aside being that implementation matters, so that the comparative-media analysis I'm about to embark upon should be seen as an attempt to grapple at one piece of the question, rather than any stab at a definitive resolution. But with that said, it seems to me that the nature of cinema, as against the nature of a novel, conspires to make this sort of scene more difficult to pull off. The first factor I'd point to is the viewer's greater susceptibility to moving-pictures-plus-sound than words. The act of responding to a movie is much more direct and visceral than that of responding to words on a page -- not to say that one is stronger than the other (I cry much more frequently reading books than watching movies), but the degree of processing that needs to occur between the art and its consumption is higher with novels, leading to a greater opportunity to audit for a sense of falseness. The cinema's been compared to a magic circle, and I think the unity of that image rings true -- if we accept one part, we accept all of it.

Relatedly, we're more accustomed to think about the slipperiness of words, compared with the unambiguity of light and sound. Words may lie but the eye never does, etc. But even beyond such cliched formulations, a photograph does feel more like a verification of an event than an eyewitness statement (often for good reason). A story is just a story, and it's as easy to make them false as true, but a photo, or a film recording, is a literal imprint of the world (until it gets altered, of course -- the epistemological difficulties that photo manipulation cause for, e.g., consumers of the daily newspaper, are an interesting problem). Without very aggressive framing, it's hard to communicate to an audience that what they're seeing might not be true (in fact, I had a friend who wrote a screenplay that failed to work for precisely this reason -- there was a scene midway through that was actually a post-hoc reconstruction of someone's incomplete memories, but even though I'm generally very good at picking up on twists, it totally sailed by me. We're trained to think of the camera's eye as impartial, unless we have good reason to think otherwise).

Finally, I think the fact that actors portray characters who in a novel are simply words on a page is perhaps the largest single factor. If the dialogue is stilted and the affect seems odd, there at least are people on screen saying and emoting them -- the same people who were doing the exact same thing before. Drawing a line between the impersonation that's happened earlier and that which is happening now is hard -- there is a living, breathing person on the screen, and the continuity of their existence is a very difficult thing to reject. Ascribing falseness to a physical, breathing person is not a natural act. We're much more likely to invent a psychologizing explanation of inconsistencies to explain why this self-evidently self-identical person is not behaving in the way we expect, than when confronted with simple print that needs to be enlivened and personified by an act of imagination.

Of course, all of this discussion is premised on a framework that makes no sense in a very deep way. All fictions are false, so what's "true" and "false" within that context is a problematic question. We could just say it's all simply a matter of narrative causality, I suppose, but that seems rather impoverished. I think it ultimately winds up being a clash of aesthetics; a good work of art establishes the frame in which it functions, and a scene or character or note is false where it clashes with that frame ([Atonement spoiler: the hard, rather dark reality that the novel establishes is betrayed by the happy-ending of Robbie surviving his wound, one notes]). But this is insufficient too, because obviously many works of art function by harnessing an internal aesthetic clash or contradiction, without exalting one to "truth" and demoting the other. And recourse to this whole line of approach as simply a cheap effect in the service of juvenile plot-twist plotting also strikes me as unsatisfyingly glib. Some scenes are true and some scenes are false, and we can feel the difference, after all.

[final Atonement spoiler:]

Is this a fuzzy-minded retreat to a reactionary, Potter-Stewart aesthetics? Perhaps. But, be that as it may, it's clear that Robbie really is dead, the reader knows it, and the viewer should know it too.

[I'm suddenly reminded of the Tim-Robbins-killing scenes in High Fidelity, where the viewer's reluctance to parse a scene as false is used to considerable comedic effect. But my lunch break is over and this is sufficiently long that a click on the post button is in order]