Nonlinear Editing and Digital Technology II

In the last chapter we introduced the notion that there is a tradition of nonlinear storytelling and that the technological shift to nonlinear editing has accelerated the consideration that this alternative approach to story is a viable option. As an option, however, it proceeds differently regarding shot selection and pace principally because the audience no longer experiences the narrative through a single main character; nor is the audience following the experience of that character from crisis to resolution.¹ Indeed we may be following multiple main characters, and there may or may not be a resolution. The conventional story arc, with its implications for editing, may simply not be relevant in the nonlinear narrative.

In order to understand the different editing choices made in nonlinear narratives, we will look at 4 nonlinear films. To explore those choices in detail and to highlight their differences from the classic narrative, we will use the following framework.

   THE FRAMEWORK

If there is no main character, no resolution, what are the goals of the editing of the nonlinear film? The first goal must be to assure that the narrative coheres, that it holds together. Each of the narrative tools of character, structure, genre, and tone may be used, but it is structure that is most critical in a macro sense.² The structural option most directly applicable to the nonlinear film is a shaping device. The murderous career of Mickey and Mallory is the shaping device in Natural Born Killers (1994); the battle for Guadalcanal is the shaping device of The Thin Red Line (1998); identity crises are the shaping device in Pulp Fiction (1994); an Atlantic island off of Georgia is the geographical shaping device and the day of migration is the temporal shaping device in Daughters of the Dust (1991). Whether the shaping device is an event, a place, a time, that device is the most general structural tool that helps the narrative cohere.

The second macro device is the voice of the filmmaker. As we saw in Chapter 1, Buñuel's narrative goal was to subvert narrative, and this dialectic highlighted his voice. Godard undermined the narrative to introject his political views through the narrative. The Coen brothers use irony to loosen us from our genre expectations in their work. Voice is the second important device that makes clear how we should experience the nonlinear narrative.

On a more detailed or micro level the nonlinear filmmaker has to concern him or herself with the issue of energy. Every narrative, linear or nonlinear, must engage the audience in an energetic experience. In the linear narrative this is far easier. The goal-directedness of the main character, the barrier of the antagonist, and the barrier of plot, provides a structure that keeps the dramatic arc moving from the critical moment of entry into the narrative and on to the culmination and resolution of the narrative. Each device implies the critical role that pace and camera movement and placement will play in energizing the narrative. The filmmaker and editor know that the close-up punctuates the most important events of the narrative.

Because the filmmaker has opted for a nonlinear narrative does not mean she can sidestep the energy issue.

What is removed from the narrative approach must be compensated for elsewhere, as an example will illustrate. The gangster film gains enormous energy from its plot: the rise and fall of the main character, the gangster. The gangster's career is in essence the plot of the film. In Pulp Fiction, however, which is a nonlinear narrative, the first thing we notice is that it has very little plot. In fact, the major plot is concentrated in the second of three stories that make up the narrative. Those stories occur out of chronological order, thereby taking temporal momentum out of the structural mix as a potential source of energy. Instead, the energy in Pulp Fiction comes from its dialogue, from the conflictual and conflicted nature of the characters. It also comes from considerable camera movement. It does not come from the traditional narrative source, the plot.

Filmmakers must replace the energy that would be more easily generated in the linear narrative. Here is an important role for the filmmaker and editor in the nonlinear edit—to find new sources to energize the narrative.

The issue for us then is to look for and to highlight those macro and micro editing strategies that make the nonlinear film connect with its audience. We turn now to our case studies.

   THE CASE OF THE ICE STORM

Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) takes place in upper-middle-class suburban Connecticut. The time is 1974 just prior to Nixon's resignation. The narrative focuses on two families, the Hoods and the Carvers. Both have two teenaged children. The families are dysfunctional in the sense that no one seems to be able to help one another. Consequently Ben Hood and Janie Carver are having an affair; their children Wendy Hood and Mikey Carver are trying to echo their “parental units.” The others in the couples, Helena Hood and Jim Carver, fluctuate between depression and a search for escape—into spirituality, into work, anywhere except the battleground of family life. The other children, Paul Hood and Sandy Carver, also look for escape—into violent fantasies in the case of Sandy. Paul Hood makes do with sexual fantasies. Sexuality as currency ties all these characters to one another: sexuality as power, as a weapon, as compensation for the sense of loss or failure, is felt by each of these characters.

The ice storm of the title refers to the storm that takes place in the last third of the narrative. The event is a natural expression of the despair of these characters. Because of the storm, an electrical wire fractures and kills Mikey Carver. But his death is as much a result of emotional neglect. He is out of it and does seem drugged out, but Mikey suffers from parents who can't help him or satisfy themselves and consequently they are disconnected from the lives of their children. Mikey is a casualty of materially rich, spiritually despairing America. His death punctuates a narrative filled with desperation and unhappiness. In this sense the sexual arc that runs through the narrative is compensatory rather than empowering its characters.

In terms of shaping devices, Ang Lee relies on one critical week in the life of the characters. It is significant that the week includes Thanksgiving, the most meaningful secular family holiday. The narrative focuses on how separate the members of two families can be, and the shaping event implies the opposite—togetherness. The dramatic conflict that runs through the narrative is generated out of this ironic paradox.

The second shaping device is to focus on two families, both with socioeconomic goals and status in common. They both have two teenagers, and they both are tied to each other by adultery and desire. Both families also have one parent who is aggressive and the other who is intelligent and marginalized within the family.

The third shaping device is behavioral. The characters all are upstanding members of the community but all become transgressive in their behavior. The most obvious transgressors are Ben Hood and Janie Carver. Both are involved in adultery. They are not alone—the concluding social event in the film is a neighborhood post-Thanksgiving party. The focus of the party is organized adultery: a key-swapping lottery for a new partner for the night. But adultery isn't the only transgression. Early in the narrative Wendy Hood steals cosmetics from the local pharmacy. Later her mother, Helena, does the same and is caught. Sandy Carver indulges in violence, blowing up his toys and fantasizing about blowing up his teacher and classmates. Even the innocent Paul Hood drugs a friend to eliminate a sexual rival. Transgression unites these characters as much as their unhappiness and socioeconomic status.

In terms of voice Ang Lee is both genre specific and distinctly authorial in The Ice Storm. The dysfunctional American family was the subject of two satires that followed Lee's film, Happiness (1998) and American Beauty (1999). Lee, on the other hand, opted to treat The Ice Storm as melodrama. All 8 characters in The Ice Storm are treated as the main character in a melodrama would be treated: as a powerless person attempting to secure power from an intractable power structure. As a result Lee invites us to empathize at one point or another with each of these characters. Even in the most extreme cases, Janie and Sandy Carver, Lee gently pokes fun at them but not so much that we can't see their pain. To feel their pain is to be with them. The other characters are easier to relate to, and they too display their vulnerability to us. Consequently, the dominant tone of The Ice Storm is realistic, and we are invited to care about each of these characters.

I have written elsewhere about Ang Lee's capacity to be inclusive of characters who too often occupy the margins of society or whose actions justify our contempt.³ This sense of inclusiveness is the voice of Ang Lee. The issue from an editing point of view is how that voice is established. The most direct path to inclusiveness is to care about the characters. Aside from the content of the shot—we do see Ben Hood totally break down in tears near the end of the film—the issue is the use of close-ups. Lee does not go overboard in his use of close-ups, but he does use them strategically. When he wants to tell us that Sandy is sexually aroused by Wendy he uses a closeup and point-of-view shot. The two are performing in the high school band, but the shot is of Sandy looking not at the conductor but rather at Wendy's exposed underwear, which is visible as he looks down at her (she is seated to play her instrument while he stands to play his). When Lee wants us to feel for the characters he will resort to a close-up. When the agitated Sandy is confused and overwhelmed by the straightforward Wendy's exhibitionist sexual proposal, Lee simply holds on Sandy's face as desire turns to terror and confusion and anger. We understand Sandy and feel his emotional confusion. It would have been far easier to treat Sandy broadly and stereotypically as an unprepared teenager. Lee instead opts to stand with Sandy rather than against him. Consequently we stand with him as well. This is a pattern Ang Lee follows with all the characters.

Lee also uses context to tell us more about the characters and their feeling states. When Helena Hood is stealing from the pharmacy, we see in the security mirror above her the reflection of the pharmacist observing her while she perpetrates the theft. When Wendy Hood steals, an older woman glares at her implying that she will be caught, but Wendy glares right back ignoring the guilt implicit in her earlier actions. By providing a social context, Lee suggests that these characters are not isolated from their society. They are simply transgressive, regardless of the views of society.

Context also provides clues to the aspirations of the characters. When Helena bumps into Reverend Phillip Edwards, a man clearly interested in her as a woman, they chat over books that are being sold in the foreground, but in the background the community church looms. Helena's search for spiritual values is highlighted, as much as her quest for freedom is highlighted by the open road before her and behind her as she rides her bike in search of the feeling of freedom she associates with her daughter more than with her own desires.

Ang Lee also uses deep focus or contextual shots to suggest power. The closer he places the camera to a character, the more powerful they are. The image of Janie Carver, foregrounded in bed with Ben Hood in the background, implies who has the power in this relationship. So too in the case of the relationship of children to adults. Very often the adults are foregrounded with the children in the background. When Lee wants to render a character even more powerless, the camera is placed farther from the character. In the last shot the Hood family is waiting for Paul Hood to get off the train. They, the adults and Wendy, are on the same plane, and the camera is far from them. The parents here are virtually equivalent to the children in their powerlessness, in their inability to help one another. The voice of Ang Lee is clear and powerful in the choice of these visuals.

As to the issue of energy, Lee uses a dual strategy to create energy in The Ice Storm. As mentioned earlier, he has adopted as one strategy the genre of melodrama. This realist approach, however, is broken intermittently by irony—an exaggeration strategy that breaks away from a connection with the characters. A scene between Ben Hood and Janie Carver makes the point. The couple has made love and Ben speaks obsessively about his antagonism toward a colleague at work, a colleague who is besting him on the golf course. Whether this is an expression of Ben's more general aggressiveness or insecurity about the implications of a rival in the workplace, Janie's response is boredom. She tells him she already has a husband, implying the boredom of the state of marriage. The aggressive humor puts Ben in his place, and for that instant the two characters are unjoyous adulterers. Although we quickly move back into realist mode, and consequently an engagement with the characters, this tonal shift unsettles as well as energizes our experience of the narrative. Similar scenes are initiated with Paul Hood, Sandy Carver, and the friends and colleagues of the Hoods and the Carvers.

A second strategy Lee uses to generate energy in the narrative is more expected. He places the camera close to the characters. His use of deep focus assures a context for the actions of these characters, and he will use point of view to create energy, as well as cutaways and strategic close-ups. A good example is the scene where Paul drugs his sexual rival for Libitz, the girl of his dreams. There they are in her empty apartment, but the plan goes awry when Libitz also drinks a drugged drink. Rather than the night on the town Paul expected, he ends up with Libitz asleep in his lap. The desirable goal looks promising, even visually; the only problem is that she is asleep. Thwarted by his own clever plan, Paul ends up as he began, alone.

   THE CASE OF HAPPINESS

Todd Solondz's Happiness (1998) is a portrait of a suburban family, the Jordans. The story focuses on the parents, Mona and Lenny Jordan; their adult daughters, Joy, Helen, and Trish; Bill Maplewood, a psychiatrist, and the husband of Trish Jordan; Billy, the son of Bill and Trish Maplewood; Andy, Joy's boyfriend; and Allen, a patient of Bill Maplewood. The prism for the narratives is relationships—love relationships, relationships of desire, parent-child relationships, and sibling relationships. The experience of the film suggests the irony of the title: the relationships are doomed by the selfabsorption of the participants and by the imbalance between the pleasure and pain principles as they operate in the lives of these characters. In other words, this is a deeply neurotic set of characters.

The film is structured initially as a number of set pieces fluctuating between the obsessive goal of one of the characters and the indifference of the character to whom they look for help. In the second half of the film the momentum of three sexual obsessions is the focus: the lust of Joy, Bill, and Allen. In each case the relationship is transgressive. Joy has an affair with a married Russian cabbie, a student in the English as-a-second-language class she teaches. Bill pines for Johnny, his 11-year-old son Billy's friend. In fact, Bill, drugs and rapes the boy. And Allen is obsessed with Helen. When she responds positively to his obscene phone call, he is frightened into the arms of an obese neighbor, Kristina, who has in turn murdered and mutilated the building's doorman for attempting to rape her. At best the relationships are exploitative, and in the case of the child rape at the hands of a pedophile psychiatrist, the result is obscene and abusive. Ironically, this is the relationship that Solondz treats with the greatest empathy.

The narrative as I've described it doesn't fully capture the shaping devices Solondz relies upon to pull this nonlinear story together. The primary shaping device is to follow the course of a number of sexual relationships. We don't enter those relationships at the same point. Where they are more conventional relationships, a marriage or a male-female relationship of equals, we see only a fragment of the relationship and the emphasis is on its failure.

A second shaping device is to look at power relationships: a parent-child relationship, a therapist-patient relationship, a teacher-student relationship. In each case the more powerful character crosses the line, thereby exploiting the relationship.

A third shaping device is the tone that assumes the ironic position so often associated with satire. This tone permeates character, dialogue, and narrative structure.

Although I have addressed the issue of voice elsewhere in my work, it requires elucidation in this chapter as well. Todd Solondz exhibits a very distinctive voice in Happiness.⁴ He is ironic and humorous about the Jordan sisters. The most-likely-to-fail sister, Joy, is the character who dominates screen time. The other sisters, Trish and Helen, have what might appear to be privileged lives. Trish has a husband and a family, and Helen has beauty and job success. But their surface successes belie a husband who is a pedophile and, in Helen's case, a dangerous promiscuity that implies failure rather than success. Both Trish and Helen are treated ironically; only Joy is allowed to become real for the audience. She has ironic moments, the relationship break-up with Andy, for example, or the kitchen conversation with Trish about happiness, but eventually Solondz relents and allows Joy moments of deep feeling—her created song, “Happiness,” and her sexual relationship with the cabbie, are both treated with real feeling.

The same can be said for the male characters. Allen, the patient, is excessive and ironic, and although the treatment of Bill the psychiatrist may be ironic, the treatment of Bill as father and as sexual predator is treated more realistically. These shifts in tonal expectations imply that irony and empathy can coexist in the same narrative. Surprise and satire are both narrative goals for Solondz, and both go to the heart of his voice in the narrative. He heaps scorn on conventional people and on conventional behavior, but his empathy for the outsider is constant, and that empathy can be generated from the behavior of a character or from a group reaction to the behavior of a character.

The fact that Solondz uses sexuality as the currency for relationships as well as an expression of power that allows us to assess the behavior of a character only intensifies our response. By viewing Bill and Andy as sexual predators, and by viewing Kristina and Helen as castrating females, Solondz is demythologizing the notion of romantic love and bringing relationships down to the level of rough sex and abusive exploitation. But this does not dim the desire of any of these characters; rather it creates a self-absorbed context that sets up a new paradigm—sex without love, love of self over love between two individuals, and finally instant gratification over a lasting commitment to a relationship. This is the destination to which Solondz's narrative and voice take us.

A great deal of energy is generated in the narrative in the conflictual shifts in tone from irony to empathy. Although Solondz sidesteps pace, using classical editing strategies such as faster pace to generate energy, he does shift from one character to another. As an episode ends with Joy and Trish, for example, another begins with Bill and his son Billy. The dissonance between scenes generates a sense of narrative conflict. Within each scene another level of conflict is generated. In the scene between Trish and Joy, the conflict is sibling rivalry focused on Joy's unhappy state. In the next scene, the conflict emanates from Billy's state of sexual ignorance. As he punishes himself for that ignorance, his father, Bill, tries to assure him that all will be well. Bill, a psychiatrist, plays sexual scientist and plies his son with information. All the while we know Bill to be a sexual predator, and his questions to his son take on a distinct ironic edge. Although the focal point of the energy in these scenes is the dialogue, the complication of the subtext for one character in each scene raises the meaning of the dialogue and the conflict level. The energy that is usually generated from pace is nevertheless a powerful dimension of these scenes; only the source of that energy differs.

Solondz also uses the contrast of fantasy and reality to energize Happiness. Allen's verbal sexual fantasies, which are aggressive and abusive, give way to his telephone search for Helen. When he eventually finds she is his neighbor, he is petrified by her positive response to his abuse. Her sadomasochistic disposition in fact meshes well with his sadomasochistic fantasies. But the reality is too much for him. He cannot succeed with the reality of Helen and he retreats to the less threatening Kristina.

Allen's psychiatrist, Bill, also has destructive fantasies, such as a walk through Central Park with an M16. His violent fantasies have many victims but a positive dimension—at least he doesn't kill himself. Here too the mix of fantasy and reality generates energy in the narrative.

Finally, the inclusion of the MTV style yields considerable energy. In the opening scene of Joy and Andy in a restaurant, for example, he proposes marriage, but she then rejects his proposal, which in turn leads him not to offer her the friendship gift he would have given to the woman who loves him—all of which is presented with the quality of a TV sitcom being filmed before a live audience. There are few shots, but the lengthy sequence is the story of an entire relationship. In intention the scene is reminiscent of the breakfast scene in Citizen Kane: an entire relationship of 5 years is spun out in 5 minutes. And in its flat TV style, filmed as if the viewer sat in a live audience in front of the two characters, the scene has an intensity and a feeling level that isn't shared by what follows. It is in effect an MTV movie unto itself.

This MTV pattern, which Solondz follows in the first half of the film, gives each scene a powerful intensity. The MTV style generates the energy that ordinarily proceeds via identification with the main character in a linear story.

   THE CASE OF THE THIN RED LINE

Terry Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998) is a war film about the battle for Guadalcanal. War films, whether they focus on a battle, a war, or a patrol that is a minor piece of a war, have a beginning, middle, and end. The end or resolution addresses whether the main character survived or did not. The tone of such films usually varies, ranging from patriotic films such as Guadalcanal Diary (1942) to the antiwar polemic of films such as Too Late the Hero (1970), a Pacific war film made while the United States was fighting the war in Vietnam. Forty-five years after the event, Malick's film is quite different from either of these extremes. In addition, rather than having a beginning, middle, and end, it is nonlinear in its presentation.

The film's nonlinearity is defined by its conscious attempt to sidestep linear structure. If the film were linear it would follow a land-on-the-island, battle-for-the-island, and win-the-island structure. Instead, Malick opens the film on a soldier, Private Witt, who has gone AWOL to another Pacific island. There he and a few army friends collude with the natives. They try to be part of the native community as opposed to that of the U.S. soldiers. When they are taken by U.S. Forces, we have no idea how much time passes before they are shipped to Guadalcanal. Certainly this soldier's outfit is shipped to Guadalcanal for the upcoming conflict. His sergeant, Ed Welsh, reluctantly takes him back into the company. From here the narrative progresses not on a time line but rather through a series of incidents: the landing; the first encounter with the enemy; the struggle to take an enemy bunker high atop the American position; the departure from the battlefield; the capture of a native village occupied by the Japanese; a patrol on which Private Witt sacrifices his life to save his patrol. But these incidents focus on the inner thoughts of a variety of soldiers in the company as well as their behavior. It's as if these inner thoughts create the private world of these characters. Rather than deal with the battle and the camaraderie that battle forges, their inner thoughts fragment the sense that the company is a unit. Instead it becomes a collection of individuals with distinct and differing goals.

Colonel Gordon Tall, who commands the company, is concerned only with the injustice of having commanding officers who are younger than he. For him the battle is an opportunity to secure the promotion that for too long has eluded him. Captain Staros, who answers to the colonel, is totally different. He is consumed by guilt and responsibility toward his men and their well-being. Captain Gaff, who is also responsible to the colonel is not racked by anything but doing the job that needs to be done. He is brave to the point of foolhardiness. Moving down the chain of command, Sergeant Welsh, who works most directly with the soldiers of the company, is survivalist and cynical. He has been disappointed in his superiors and consequently works to help his men deal with the threat of the enemy as well as the threat of the chain of command. Above all he wants to live, and he wants to help his men live.

The film focuses on three privates in the company, Private Witt, whom we meet at the opening of the narrative and who dies at its close. Witt is concerned about his place in the world. He feels he belongs in the outfit and has a responsibility to his fellow soldiers, as well as to his family at home and to the natives he meets on the Islands. This is a man looking to define his place in the universe. Another soldier, Corporal Fife, has a narrower field of focus: he looks beyond himself only to look at death in the universe. He is fearful and obsessed by the meaning of death. Yet another, Private Jack Bell, thinks only about home, specifically about his wife. He yearns for her, reveling in memories of his recent marriage, bathed in the recollection of the aliveness of her sexuality. Unfortunately, his feelings are not shared by his wife. Late in the narrative he receives a letter from her; she writes that she is leaving him for another man, an available States-side man.

Each man acts as a narrator, giving voice to his inner thoughts. The multiple points of view push the experience of the film as a nonlinear discontinuous experience. Together with an episodic structure, The Thin Red Line in fact becomes an impressionistic tone poem rather than a polemic putting forward a particular position on a particular battle in a particular war.

In order to give the film shape Malick poses a series of relationships, keying in on those relationships to break down the geography and the chronological progress of a significant World War II battle. Private Witt in the company relates to humanity in general, as we have seen. He relates to the native islanders as he does to his own comrades; he relates to them as people, as a part of humanity rather than as the enemy separated out of humanity. He even relates to the enemy, who in the end will kill him. Private Bell, on the other hand, relates more to the home front than he does to his comrades or to his presence on the island. American soldiers are not the only relationships Malick explores. Enemy soldiers when captured express the pain, the unbearable pain of losing their comrades. This particular scene humanizes the enemy just as the later death scene of Private Witt humanizes Witt as well as the enemy. Throughout the narrative Malick humanizes and individualizes so that the soldiers become individuals and people rather than soldiers. Each of the relationships portrayed mitigates against the solidarity of viewing the company of man as a war machine. Malick views the enemy, the U.S. soldiers, and the natives as individuals, as human beings. But humans are nothing more than part of the natural order, a part of the natural world. Consequently, his film nature, whether it be birds or bats or overgrown fields and outsized trees, plays an omnipresent role, as if to say that nature will endure, whatever man does to his fellow man. This is the voice of Terrence Malick. Relationships are the vehicle for this meditation. The war story is the genre he has used to explore these ideas about man and nature.

Voice can be genre specific, but many filmmakers challenge genre expectations in order to strengthen their voices. The Coen brothers, for instance, use satire to undermine the expected realism of the police story in Fargo (1996). Martin Scorsese uses a dark hyper-realism to undermine the heroism of the sports film in Raging Bull (1980). War films tend to realism, although Agnieszka Holland has used satire to make Europa Europa (1990), a child's nightmare come true. In Come and See (1985), Elem Klimov also takes the point of view of an adolescent's experience of war, but he creates a more intense nightmare. Terry Malick sees war differently, more philosophically. The tone he chooses for The Thin Red Line is poetic, stirring, and yet never nationalistic or patriotic. Malick is interested in questions of life and death, questions of friendship and of love. He is also concerned with man's place in the natural world. Consequently he doesn't see the battle for Guadalcanal in political, military, or economic terms. The result is an unhurried meditation on human behavior as well as of human behavior during unnatural events such as war. If there is antagonism here, it is also philosophical—what is death? What is life? What does it mean to help another or to empathize with another? These questions consume the narrative, influence behavior, and generally drive the shape of the narrative. This is a war film, but Malick had made it the most unusual of war films—a meditation rather than a melodrama. This is Malick's unique voice in The Thin Red Line.

Malick has supported that voice by changing the balance between plot and character layers in The Thin Red Line. For the most part the war film is a genre dominated by plot. The patrol to find Private Ryan in Saving Private Ryan (1997), the attack on the Ant Hill and its aftermath in Paths of Glory (1957), the attempted escape through the sewers of Warsaw in Kanal (1957), are all plot-driven narratives. That is not to say that the character layer isn't important in the war film, as it is in all the above-mentioned films. But plot dominates the war film. The Thin Red Line is an exception. Malick raises the character layer of all characters thereby downgrading the importance of plot. How this works is that the plot of the attack on the bunker, for example, is undermined by the elevation of the relationship stories of the Captain Staros and the Colonel Tall. The colonel will sacrifice any relationship to advance his ambition. His unwillingness to provide water for the company attacking the bunker supports his lack of care for others. The captain on the other hand, refuses to send his men into battle. He cares too much. In both of these cases, the scenes highlight the nature of each character, as opposed to the progress of the battle.

A similar result is created in the attack on the village on Guadalcanal. Rather than detailing the progress of the attack, Malick focuses on the feelings of the captives, the Japanese, their pain, their sense of loss with regard to dead comrades, their fear about their own fates. Instead of demonizing the enemy, Malick humanizes the enemy, thereby undermining the sense of victory for the main characters. This upgrade of character layer and downgrade of plot undermines genre expectations and accentuates Malick's voice.

Besides changing the balance between the plot and character layers, Malick uses narrative detail that pushes voice forward is his emphasis on two extreme states: living and dying. Particular sequences engender both phenomena. Movement through the tall grass convey the awareness that in one instant you are totally alive but in the next instant you could be dead. Living soldiers came upon the dead, or at least parts of the dead. The sequence of moving through the fog has a similar feeling—a heightened sense of the danger that brings death. During the battle for the bunker, Sergeant Keck falls on a grenade that accidentally explodes. Malick lingers over his dying. So too the death of Private Witt, who dies to save his patrol. But here Malick moves away from the moment of death to the elements of life dear to him: nature, the island natives, and animal life. These elements live on while he dies.

In this latter scene we see a recurring theme for Malick—the natural order. Although there are war films that embrace technology, such as Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Apocalypse Now (1979), Malick's narrative seems the opposite. It is environmental in its concerns rather than nationalistic or technological. It should come as no surprise that he ends the film with three shots of nature rather than of characters or machines.

Malick also uses narration to give voice to his philosophical concerns. “Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light?” “Is this darkness in you too?” “You are like my sons. My dear sons. I'll carry you around wherever I go.” “War turns men into dogs. It poisons the soul.” These words are spoken by a variety of characters who probe for meaning. They are both personal and poetic. These are the deep issues that Malick associates with war.

Malick's nonlinear approach to the narrative means giving up the natural strengths that plot and a main character yield: involvement. To do so means finding other means to energize the experience of the narrative. What alternative technologies does Malick use to energize the narrative? The first strategy Malick uses is to provide contrast between sequences. As mentioned earlier the sequences are not organized in a progressive or linear fashion. Although they generally follow the time line of an invasion, neither the proportion of film time spent on each sequence nor the narrative approach to those sequences, builds progressively to a climax. Indeed, the focus in the scenes will vary from pain and loss among the enemy in the taking of the village to the opposite goals of a captain and a colonel as they face the challenge of capturing a hill dominated by an enemy bunker. The contrast at times is so great that the viewer is faced always with the unexpected.

More conventionally but no less effectively, Malick relies on the moving camera, particularly in the military movement through the fog, the advance through the overgrown fields, and the attack on the bunker as well as the village. Subjective movement places us with the soldier Corporal Fife as he advances. The anticipation and the anxiety are captured by the moving camera. As much as possible the pace of the movement simulates human movement, resulting in an identification with the feeling level of the soldier in each case.

Malick also relies on close-ups to intensify the emotion and the energy in particular scenes. Sergeant Welsh talking to his men, whether it is about belonging to the company or carrying morphine to a dying man on the battlefield, is presented in close-up. So too is Private Bell, who is obsessed with his wife at home. When the flashbacks occur they contain movement as well as off-center framing, as if the soldier struggles to contain the memory and also to possess the sexuality, the life force, he associates with his wife. Closeups intensify his desire to hold on to those memories and to that desire.

Finally, Malick uses cutaways to remind us that there is a world beyond the battlefield—a world with families and with children, and a world where nature not only exists but where it prevails. Again and again Malick cuts away to images of that natural world, the context for his soldiers’ story.

   THE CASE OF MAGNOLIA

Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) functions as a nonlinear drama but, as in the case of Anderson's other films, it also functions as a movie about moviemaking (a constructed reality), or more broadly the media. In the case of Magnolia, the prologue consists of narration. A skeptical narrator describes in detail 3 remarkable coincidences from the past. Each is framed as a past “how-done-it” as opposed to a who-done-it. Each incident ends in a death: the first a murder, the second an accident, and the third a suicide. Then Anderson proceeds to question, and in the case of the last incident prove, that it was something else: a murder rather than a suicide. Each case is a puzzle that is deconstructed to challenge or alter the first impression. The prologue also implies that the media creates illusions and that we, the viewers, should be skeptical about such constructed realities. Stories are told in the media but they can be reconfigured to alter their impact and meaning. Anderson uses pace and detailed close-ups to make the experience of the 3 stories of the prologue exciting. They leave us winded, not having had enough time to digest and process the visual and aural information.

Using the same sense of dynamic pace he launches us into the multiple stories of the main body of the narrative. What proceeds are the stories of 8 characters who will participate in essentially 3 story lines. By coincidence each story will link to the others. The first story is the story of the Partridge Family. The son, Jack, is now known as Frank Mackie, a media phenomenon. Frank is the voice for men being aggressive toward women, but his version of aggressiveness is as close as possible to rape just shy of being charged with a crime. His program is, needless to say, called “Seduce and Destroy.” Frank (Jack) is alienated from his father Earl, who is dying. Before he dies, Earl would like to reconcile with his son, whom he deserted when he discovered that his wife Jack's mother was dying of cancer. Earl's new wife, Linda, who married him for his money, is now disintegrating because the man she's come to love is dying, and she is overwhelmed by the knowledge that she will lose him.

The second story is the story of Jimmy Gator, a famous TV game show host. Professionally, he is immensely popular; personally, he is dying of cancer and wants to reconcile with his daughter, Claudia. Claudia is a promiscuous coke addict who hates her father for sexually abusing her when he was drunk. Jim is a police officer who is earnest about his work. He is called to Claudia's apartment because of a complaint about noise from the stereo. Jim, rather than charging Claudia, falls in love with her. Their relationship rescues her from the self-destructive arc of her life.

The third story is that of Donnie, an adult child star made famous on an earlier TV game show. Today he has ruined his work life and his love life is even less successful. Stealing money from his current employer seems to be the solution to all his problems. It's not. Parallel to this story is the story of Stanley, a contemporary child star on Jimmy Gator's TV show. He is so knowledgeable that his 2 child teammates depend upon him to win. But Stanley is driven to win by a relentless, cruel father. When Stanley has to go to the bathroom no one on the show is empathetic, and when he finally urinates in his pants, his father goes ballistic. Stanley refuses to “play” genius for television or for his father. He just wants to be treated like the child he is.

All these stories are linked because Earl Partridge owns the TV game show, the setting for parts of two of the stories. In addition, Jim from the second story rescues Donnie from becoming a thief in the third story.

The best way to frame the stories is to consider each of the 8 characters as a character in crisis. Anderson for the most part treats the stories realistically. The dramatic arc of the stories leads the characters to help each other. Jim and Claudia help each other, and Jim helps Donnie return the stolen funds. One event or coincidence that is notable is that the narrative occurs in the late stages of each story. We can correlate the moment at which Anderson enters the narrative to the point of deepest despair for Jack, for Claudia, for Jimmy, and for Donnie. At this moment, during an intense storm, the rain is replaced by frogs falling from the sky. This event, analogous in tone to the plagues Moses called forward to punish Egypt for retaining the Jews as slaves, has a shocking, surreal quality, although Anderson treats the storm of pests realistically. After this event, reconciliation and recovery begin. Stanley tells his father that he wants to be considered as a child. Jack (Frank) cries for his father. And Jim helps Donnie return the stolen money. The film closes with Claudia breaking out in a smile. All of these signals of hope for the despairing characters seem to pivot on this act of God, the storm of pestilence. The storm and its character, together with the prologue, shifts Magnolia from the melodrama that it appears to be to a moral fable, a hyperdrama.⁵

The principal shaping device Anderson uses is the notion of three interconnected narratives. As in stories told in the prologue, each can lead to death. In the first Earl Partridge will die, probably never forgiven by the son he deserted. In the second story Jimmy will certainly die of cancer, but his daughter Claudia may also die, given the level of her self-destruction. In the third story, it is the dignity of the character that is being destroyed: both Donnie and Stanley are being destroyed by their dependency upon the fame television has brought them. And in each case divine intervention or its equivalent, profound empathy for the other, saves the character from what appears to be their inevitable fate.

A second shaping device is the state of despair shared by so many of these characters. Even Frank Mackie, who was Jack Partridge in a former life, seems to be overwhelmingly defensive in his aggressive “Seduce and Destroy” posturing. We discover that he has never gotten over the wound of being abandoned by his father. He speaks of caring for his sick mother, but he has been abused by his father no less than Claudia has been by hers. Donnie longs for a lost past as much as he longs for the local muscular bartender. Stanley despairs for a lost childhood, and Earl despairs for his past sins, principally abandoning the wife, who died of cancer, a woman he loved deeply.

A third shaping device is the presence of the media in all these stories. Its presence provides a public-private forum to consider each of the characters. In the first story, Earl is a public success, for he owns successful television shows; but privately, as a husband and father, he is a failure. His son Jack (Frank) is a media star, a man's man, but privately he is a posturing, defensive boy, fearful of his deepest feelings. In the second story, Jerry is the most long-lasting TV game show host. Publicly, he is a star; privately, he is a failed father and a failing husband. In the third story, Stanley is the most brilliant child contestant on the Jimmy Gator show, but privately he is a young boy who wants to go out and play—to be a boy, rather than to be “a star,” the role his father clearly needs him to be.

Anderson for the most part treats these stories realistically as we would expect in a melodrama. The result is that we become emotionally engaged with the characters, thereby masking voice as a key shaping device.⁶ On the other hand, Anderson's use of the prologue together with the narrative intervention of the pestilence late in the narrative provides a constructed overlay to the realism of the narrative. It is here in the narration, in the skepticism about coincidence and the implicit skepticism about the manipulative capabilities of what we think we see (i.e., a construction, an anecdote, or a movie), that Anderson's voice is given its freest rein. By implying that a filmmaker can construct and alter perception, Anderson is alerting us to the power he yields in the film. Consequently, what we will watch is also a construction, albeit a powerful one. The dissonance between the prologue, the pestilence intervention, and the stories of these 8 desperate characters allows us to be involved with their stories but also to remember we are watching a film, a construction, an intentional coincidence. In this way Anderson allows us to have a powerful film narrative experience as well as his voice—which cautions that what we are watching is a construction, as all films are.

The energy in Magnolia comes from rather classical sources. The most important is pace. Anderson uses, and even overuses, pace, as early as the prologue. The cutting is so rapid that we can barely keep up with the 3 stories of coincidence. That breathless sense of pace carries on as he introduces all of the characters. Not only does Anderson introduce them quickly via rapid cross-cutting, but within each of the individual stories he also uses rapid camera motion and intense close-ups. This is a pattern he will use throughout the narrative: motion, close-up motion, and cutting on movement. Whatever the mood, the pace raises the energy level in the presentation of each of the stories.

Whenever Anderson wants to make an important point, however, he will hold on a shot to register that point. When Donnie realizes that he is trapped, he says: “The past is not through with us.” When Frank is caught up in a lie about his past (about caring for a dying mother, or about growing up locally), he glares at the documentary reporter who has thrown his past back at him. Each of these scenes works with the notion of reversing the pace that has prevailed in the narrative, and Anderson's point is made.

Anderson also generates energy from the proximity of the camera to the characters in the different stories. A created song for the film, “It's Not Going to Stop Until You Rise Up,” is sung by all of the characters. Anderson cuts from character to character as the song proceeds, each taking his or her turn singing the words. This artifice links each to the other and to the notion that they are each characters in a film as well as performers for a film.

Just as the film begins with a prologue, it ends with an epilogue. The epilogue is about confession, about characters revealing themselves, and states, “Sometimes people need to be forgiven.”

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