I am a girl who grew up in the heart of Bangalore and my parents hardly let me leave the house. The lack of freedom was probably what turned me towards books eventually. I would pick up a Harry Potter novel or an Enid Blyton mystery and find a cozy spot in my bed where I could read the story in peace. Thrillers were the best. I never knew where the next twist would come from and those mini worlds of adventure in my mind were much more interesting than the real one.
Once my friends taught me how to torrent movies off the net, I discovered the joy of seeing stories in motion. Movies were not just stories to me. It was like I could actually take a step into the imagination of another person with grandiose vision. The ‘twist’ that I so loved in books was amplified when I saw Christopher Nolan use it in his movies. What was the secret which made this magician’s tricks work? On introspection, I found patterns in his movies that I gradually began to decode.
Like a good detective story, Nolan’s screenplays would withhold a key piece of information to dazzle the viewer in the end. But unlike other stories, usually this big reveal would be about the narrator. And suddenly you’re left wondering whether everything you’ve seen is one big farce. How do you believe a story if the narrator is unreliable in the first place?
When I watched Memento, I was rooting for Leonard all along. After all, he was the underdog with the memory defect. How unfair for a guy with his disability to be pitted against a hardcore killer… But wait, who’s this creepy lady? How does he know her? Is this Teddy guy trying to exploit him? Good for Leonard that he got him….WHAT? Leonard made up this whole thing?! But I believed him!
That’s the problem. When you see the story from the point of view of the guy who’s narrating it, you are only concerned about how things happened or what’s going to happen next. The flow of events is more important because as temporal beings what we always focus on is : “What happened before? What’s going on now? What’s going to happen next?”
But the more important question is – Is the guy telling the truth?
I remember when I watched “Shutter Island” with my mother, she banned me from watching Star Movies for a week because that was not the kind of movie that “girls were supposed to watch.” I spent the week thinking about why the ending disturbed me so much. Was it because I had seen the entire story from the point of view of DiCaprio and realized he was Mr.Schizophrenic in the end? Or was it because I was unsure about what the actual story was?
Sometimes its easier to adjust to any coherent sequence of events rather than float around in a void with no single story. Any meaning is good meaning.
I watched Inception. My question was : Is Dom in a dream or is he awake? What actually happened?
Just as I thought Batman is dead…I see Alfred smiling at him in Florence. Wait, is this Alfred’s imagination? Is he dreaming? Is Wayne alive?
The Prestige had two unreliable narrators…With both magicians trying to trick each other with false information planted in their diaries. But all I knew was what they wrote in their diaries. By the end I had no clue of what was true and what was false anymore.
What can thrill you can also scare you.
On weekends, I used to hang out at my friend Pratiksha’s place and we would watch horror movies for the entire day. Pratiksha’s mom thought we were the craziest girls on the block because we would put on a movie like “The Exorcist” and laugh convulsively when the girl’s head started rotating on her neck. We knew every scene beforehand and these scenes reminded us of the whirling head in Scooby Dooby Doo or the battered cat in Tom and Jerry.
On one such day I picked up ‘The Shining’ by Stephen King. If I could laugh at horror movies, surely a book was no big deal? The start went just fine with Jack Torrance and his family making themselves at home in the Overlook hotel. Even the cook seemed like a nice guy…Where was the horror in all this?
Then the wasps crawled out of their nest. But Jack was supposed to have sprayed that with insecticide before… Hmm, of course those hedge animals were stationary. Or were they? Damn, that lady in the bathtub nearly scared me. And between sentences a mean voice kept speaking up at regular intervals
…REDRUM, REDRUM….
and I had no idea why it disturbed me.
The reveal was simple : Jack Torrance was not mentally sound. He had not disinfected the wasp’s nest, he had imagined the hedge animals moving around and the mean voices that spoke up at regular intervals were his. Yet the dissonance in the two voices was more unnerving than any horror flick that I had watched before, because….
The story had been narrated from the point of view of Jack Torrance. The scary part was him coming to terms with the realization that the voices in the back of his head were his own. The worst demons were those that he nurtured, deep in his psyche.
It was not just Jack but even the story which had come unhinged. The realization that he was a man who could even fudge his own memories put his kid in grave danger. The childish incantation of REDRUM now seemed like a satanic chant. Suddenly I had no idea what I was reading. Everything was false and anything could happen. It was the literary equivalent of walking around in a dark house waiting for a spectre to pounce on me except that the apparition was now formless and I couldn’t make fun of it as I had in “The Exorcist.”
None of my other friends found out what true horror meant because I was the only girl who read ‘The Shining’. Horror was being swept off your feet when you had no idea what was going on. The guy telling you the story turned out be a lunatic. And he was the one you were running from.
Its very difficult not to trust the narrator when the story is being told. But that trust is what ends up being used against you. The chasm between what you think you know and what actually is, that’s the dark area you peer down trying to make sense of what happened. It’s a strange feeling, grasping for the truth when the only truth you know is what a liar told you.
Keep trusting and you get a good story till the very end. But examine your trust for a moment and you realize that the narrator could just be an illusion.
Even in this story.-K.R Adhithya
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