Contingency, causality, complexity: distributed agency in the mind-game film

Elsaesser, Thomas

doi:10.1080/17400309.2017.1411870

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Creemos que Firewatch es un síntoma de este proceso. Un proceso que no es ajeno a las tendencias de otros medios y que también se identifican en los videojuegos como por ejemplo los mind games films que más que construir enigmas en pos de su resolución, se plantea un estado mental de los protagonistas y donde la decisión individual y la elección racional no son suficientes para solucionar sus conflictos (Elsaesser 2018).…”

Section: Conclusionesunclassified

Narrativa y Gameplay en Abyme en Firewatch

Alvarado¹

2022

ToDIGRA

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Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016) es un videojuego con apariencia de aventura y misterio que pertenece al género denominado walking simulator. En estos videojuegos, el jugador explora un amplio espacio caminando, manipulando objetos y, en ocasiones, resolviendo acertijos simples. El entorno espacial, la estética y la música construyen una experiencia lúdica centrada en la experiencia emocional de los personajes dentro del desarrollo de una historia. Firewatch sigue las convenciones de este género y utiliza varias tramas cuyo objetivo no es componer un mosaico narrativo de personajes e historias, sino explicar, reforzar y clarificar la historia principal, la relación de Henry, el protagonista, con su esposa. El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar el funcionamiento de los niveles narrativo y lúdico de Firewatch aplicando una metodología analítica basada en la narrativa especular, ampliamente estudiada en la literatura por Mieke Bal, Genette y especialmente Lucien Dällenbach, la mise en abyme. El diseño del juego persigue más que componer una trama convencional, construir la representación jugable del mapa mental y emocional del personaje.Firewatch (Campo Santo 2016) is a video game with an adventure and mystery appearance that belongs to the walking simulator genre. In these video games, the player explores a wide space by walking, manipulating objects and sometimes solving simple puzzles. The spatial environment, aesthetics and music build a playful experience focused on the emotional experience of the characters within the development of a story. Firewatch follows the conventions of this genre and uses several plots whose objective is not to compose a narrative mosaic of characters and stories, but to explain, reinforce and clarify the main story, the relationship of Henry, the protagonist, with his wife. The objective of this paper is to explore the functioning of the narrative and playful levels of Firewatch by applying an analytical methodology based on specular narrative, widely studied in the literature by Mieke Bal, Genette and especially Lucien Dällenbach, the mise en abyme. The design of the game pursues more than composing a conventional plot, building the playable representation of the mental and emotional map of the character. Keywords.

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Section: Conclusionesunclassified

Narrativa y Gameplay en Abyme en Firewatch

Alvarado¹

2022

ToDIGRA

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“…The "if only"/"what if" effects are explicitly pursued in forking-path narratives (Blind Chance, Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, Twelve Monkeys, Déjà Vu, Source Code) and richly explored as the motifs of thought experiment in "mind-game" films that Thomas Elsaesser (2009Elsaesser ( , 2018 explores in a philosophical framework, which overlaps with my framework regarding many ideas-I also analyzed time-travel mind-game films elsewhere (Jeong 2019a). However, these films do not necessarily pivot around network narratives but often reinforce the sense and logic of community I will later discuss.…”

Section: Mapping Network Narratives Global Community As a Totalized Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Network Narratives in Global Cinema: The Shift from Community to Network and Their Narrative Logics

Jeong

2021

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In the backdrop of global interconnection, such films as “Crash”, “Syriana”, and “Babel” drew attention to the six-degrees-of-separation “network narrative.” This type of distributed narrative with multiple access points or discrete threads has long evolved, perhaps since Griffith’s “Intolerance” and via modern masterpieces: Altman’s “Nashville” and “Shortcuts” weave many characters into a portrait of their social ground unmapped by themselves; Bunuel’s “Phantom of Liberty” shifts among characters only through the contingent movement of the camera. These two elements (multiple characters, a floating agent) intermingle now in the way that the protagonist takes the role of the very agent navigating among contingently networked characters in further decentralized directions: “Birdman” centers on the hero’s salvation but many other people around him form and cross small dramas; the protagonist in “Waking Life” shuffles through a dream meeting various people; “Holly Motors” stages a Parisian’s bizarre city odyssey, with the true agent turning out to be a car/cars; “Mysterious Object at Noon” experiments on the ‘exquisite corpse’ relay of a story through different people whom the director encounters while moving around... What does this non-linearity with different causal relations imply? How do mobile agents floating over decentralized events relate to global networks in general? This paper investigates today’s network narratives through an interdisciplinary approach to the notion of network as opposed to community even beyond film narratology. For instance, if the masculine formula of Lacan’s sexuation (all are submitted to the phallic function but for one exception) underlies community, its feminine formula (not all are submitted to the phallic function but there is no exception) works for networking. Community forms the totality of all and an exception that fuels the universal desire to make it utopian, but network has the infinity of drives to (dis)connections dismantling community, yet thereby leaving no exceptional outside. Community is a closed set of subjects who may be ‘abjected’ from it; network is an open whole of endless links along which the subject-abject shift constantly occurs in the mode of being ‘on/off’ rather than ‘in/out.’ In Deleuze’s terms, community works as a “tree-like” vertical system of hierarchical units in the historical trajectory to its perfection, whereas the network creates a “rhizomatic” horizontal movement of molecular forces in non-dialectic, non-linear directions. Foucauldian “discipline” is a key to subjectivation in the community, but it turns into Deleuzian “control” in the network that promotes flexible agency and continuous modulation without exit. As actor-network theorists argue, nothing precedes and exists outside ever-changing networks of relationship. The network narrative will thus be explored as a cinematic symptom of the radical shift from community to network that both society and subjectivity undergo with all the potentials and limitations in our global age.

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“…On the one hand, some have proposed that today's complex films are merely "trickled down" mainstream incarnations of previous artcinematic storytelling experiments (e.g., Kovács 2007, 60;Cameron 2008;Klecker 2011), whereas other scholars have argued that the trend should mostly just be seen as a series of intensified variations -mere complications -of longestablished and prevailing classical narrative principles (see, most notably the consistent contentions of Bordwell and Thompson 2013). 16 Also others have sought to define contemporary complex films as some form of novel hybrid, seeing them as a new and distinctly post-classical breed of puzzle films that question or deconstruct the narrative principles by which they are governed (such as linearity, causality, coherence and congruity, or the relative trustworthiness and transparency of narration) and that "suspend the common contract between the film and its viewers" (Elsaesser 2009, 19; see also Thanouli 2006;Buckland 2009Buckland , 2014or Elsaesser 2017). Although it was not our intention to directly engage with these ongoing scholarly debates here, it became apparent that in the case of Mulholland Drive, viewers' stances actually correspond to all these different conceptualizations.…”

Section: Interpretive Multi-stability As a Viewing Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Last Year at Mulholland Drive: Ambiguous Framings and Framing Ambiguities

Willemsen

Kiss

2019

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

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This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and the numerous contrasting interpretations that this film has generated. Rather than offering an(other) interpretation of the film, we aim to investigate some of the reasons why Lynch’s highly complex narrative has gained a cult – if not classic – status in recent film history. To explain the striking variety of (often conflicting) interpretations and responses that the film has evoked, we analyse its complex narrative in terms of its cognitive effects. Our hypothesis is that part of Mulholland Drive’s attractiveness arises from a cognitive oscillation that the film allows between profoundly differing, but potentially equally valid interpretive framings of its enigmatic story: as a perplexing but enticing puzzle, sustained by (post-)classical cues in its narration, and as an art-cinematic experience that builds on elements from experimental, surrealist, or other film- and art-historical traditions. The urge to narrativize Mulholland Drive, we argue, is driven by a distinct cognitive hesitation between these conflicting arrays of meaning making. As such, the film has been trailblazing with regards to contemporary cinema, setting stage for the current trend of what critics and scholars have called complex cinema or puzzle films.

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Contingency, causality, complexity: distributed agency in the mind-game film

Cited by 19 publications

References 23 publications

Narrativa y Gameplay en Abyme en Firewatch

Narrativa y Gameplay en Abyme en Firewatch

Network Narratives in Global Cinema: The Shift from Community to Network and Their Narrative Logics

Last Year at Mulholland Drive: Ambiguous Framings and Framing Ambiguities

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