Cinematic Overtures

by Annette Insdorf

  8

  Voice-Over Narration/Flashback

  Sunset Boulevard, American Beauty, Fight Club, Badlands

  From openings that focus on the camera’s selective revelation of information, we move to the role of voice-over narration in creating as well as subverting narrative expectations. For a temporally sequential medium like the cinema, circular structures ignite a particular tension. Or as Victor Brombert wisely observed about Mircea Eliade’s book The Myth of Eternal Return, “Our biological and cultural makeup is such that we require to fight sheer linearity (which means submission to undoing) by invoking notions of cyclical rehabilitation.… Modern man, according to this view, is in particular need of this rehabilitation, as he feels the anguish of his linear, progress-oriented notion of history, as well as of the inexorable laws of evolutionism. In Eliade’s perspective, history and progress are perceived as a fall implying the loss of the paradise of archetypes and of repetition, and a longing for the axis mundi that might offer resistance to concrete historic time.”1 Films that unfold in flashback—such as Fight Club and Pulp Fiction—embody this tension, beginning and ending with the same shot.

  For a generation used to the power of literally rewinding to an earlier point, the “return” notion inherent in flashbacks is a given. Countless films begin at a moment that is actually the end of the story and then go back in time to trace how the characters and situations arrived there. The flashback structure is not merely a stylistic choice on the part of the screenwriter or director but a thematic and even philosophical one. Flashbacks make the viewer aware of time itself, and often of circularity: rewinding takes place each time the film ends—and begins again—on circular reels. Flashbacks heighten the degree to which a film is self-enclosed and foreground the self-conscious act of storytelling (including the fallible narrator). For example, The Imitation Game (2014) begins with Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice-over asking, “Are you paying attention?” This question is directed not only at the policeman who is interrogating his character, Alan Turing, in a 1951 Manchester police station but also at the viewer. “You cannot judge me until I’m finished,” he says. Flashbacks to World War II present his leadership of the secret British group that is trying to break the German Enigma code system and decipher messages. The film keeps circling back to 1951: each time we return, we know more. The concentric narration of Morten Tyldum’s drama—from an Oscar-winning screenplay by Graham Moore—enables us to understand both Turing’s intellectual excitement and his personal vulnerability as a gay man.

  Interrupting the linear flow of the story, flashbacks are particularly appropriate for expressing the fragmentation we associate with a postmodern world. Nevertheless, this structure was already prevalent in 1940s film noir and then used cleverly by Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard (1950). What do we make of a story narrated by a man who is already dead? Wilder was a brilliant chronicler of characters less “heroic” than vain, greedy, or simply lost. Although he allegedly told his cowriter, Charles Brackett, that Sunset Boulevard would be a tender film about a silent movie star who makes a comeback twenty years after the world has forgotten her, their black-and-white drama turned out to be a cynical portrait of Hollywood vanity and opportunism. He cast silent-movie star Gloria Swanson as diva Norma Desmond and William Holden as Gillis, the ambitious young screenwriter who becomes her kept man (see clip). Gillis’s voice-over dominates the soundtrack from the opening lines: “Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It’s about 5 o’clock in the morning. That’s the homicide squad, complete with detectives and newspaper men.” Accompanying exterior shots of a mansion, his narration purports to offer “the whole truth.” But the camera aimed at a floating body from the bottom of the swimming pool is already lying. With the policemen looking down, a shot through water could never yield such clarity. (Wilder had a large mirror placed at the bottom of the pool and shot into its reflection.) This particular perspective makes us feel like we have sunk to the lowest point, perhaps appropriate to a film about far-from-noble characters. In actuality, Wilder shot the scene after the movie was completed. The original version began in a morgue, including voices of the corpses. After a preview audience laughed, he added the voice-over of Gillis and the tracking shot of the street in lieu of the morgue. His voice takes us back six months: the camera enters the window through curtains—a pre-Psycho penetration of the frame before the story really begins—and finds Gillis at his typewriter.

  In fine film noir fashion (appropriate to the writer-director of Double Indemnity), Sunset Boulevard ends where it began. Although we have learned that the corpse floating in the swimming pool is Gillis—who was shot by Norma after he rejected her—his voice-over continues: “Well, this is where you came in, back at that pool again, the one I always wanted. It’s dawn now and they must have photographed me a thousand times.” For a film whose riveting focus is an imperious star of silent movies, words provide the frame. Even Norma’s concluding walk down the stairs of her mansion—amid photographers and reporters prepared for her arrest—is accompanied by Gillis’s voice beyond the grave: “So they were turning after all, those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her.”

  FIGURE 8.1  The corpse in the swimming pool of Sunset Boulevard

  American Beauty adopts a similar narrative structure, told from beyond the grave of the protagonist. Released in 1999, Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winning film, scripted by Alan Ball, is a savagely funny critique of the suburban, consumerist family, laced with transcendent glimmers. Kevin Spacey plays Lester, a nonentity who barely communicates with his tightly coiled wife (Annette Bening), a real estate agent, or sullen teenage daughter, Jane (Thora Birch), whose face opens the film. He comes alive only upon seeing Jane’s friend Angela (Mena Suvari), a sexy “American beauty” that he imagines covered in the eponymous rose petals of the movie’s title. Although the film chronicles his transformation from wimp to aggressively hedonistic man in control, the secondary characters are sharply drawn. The family that moves next door has a shattering effect on Lester’s household, especially Fitts (Chris Cooper), a colonel who tries to keep his enigmatic teenaged son, Ricky (Wes Bentley), in line. His wife, Barbara (Allison Janney), is a poignant cipher lost between an angry, gun-collecting husband and a son who secretly sells drugs to pay for his videotaping habit. Ricky is like a younger, pot-smoking version of Lester, one who manages to get away with the things for which his older neighbor yearns. After Ricky quits his catering job, Lester tells him, “You’ve just become my hero,” and then resigns from his own employment.

  Ricky is a voyeur, hiding behind his camera and taping Jane; she grows to like it, perhaps because he is the only one who really looks at her. American Beauty opens with the self-conscious internal frame of his gaze as Jane, lying on her side, speaks into the camera (see clip). The film plays with our voyeurism as well as our assumptions about the time frame: the first image—Jane asking Ricky to kill Lester—is later revealed to be a flash-forward. The second scene presents Lester’s voice from beyond the grave, rendering the rest of the film a flashback. “In less than a year, I’ll be dead,” says the voice-over, adding moments later, “I’m dead already.” In a 2016 unpublished paper, Columbia University student Andrew Bell pointed out that the horizontal introduction of Jane—followed by Lester in bed—suggests “a shared apathy and sense of defeat. These characters are so beaten down by their environment, cultural expectation, and boredom that they’re moribund.… All of Mendes’ characters are trapped by the voyeuristic, judgmental gaze of the people around them.”2

  Accompanying a high-angle view of a suburban neighborhood, the repeated playful notes of Thomas Newman’s score are like a musical analogue of the look-alike houses. As the film unfolds, it reveals what lies beneath the picture-perfect exterior. Misperception is key, especially when Fitts peers through Ricky’s camera into Lester’s house and sees his son close to their smiling ne
ighbor. Although it looks like sex to the homophobic father, they are simply rolling a joint, which leads to a fatal denouement. The second sequence begins with Lester’s reflection in the computer screen of his office, trapped behind bars of data. Like Jane in the opening, he is framed within a screen; unlike his daughter, he is alone, a mere copy of a human being. Despite the memorable red petals on Angela’s body in fantasy scenes, American Beauty conveys the prick of the thorns under the rose.

  FIGURE 8.2  Lester (Kevin Spacey) reflected in his computer in American Beauty

  The opening sequence is markedly different from Ball’s early screenplay draft, which begins with Ricky in a jail cell. The second scene is in a courtroom, where Jane hears Angela testifying that Jane wanted her father dead. Fitts then brings evidence to the police station, including the footage of his son filming Jane. It is only on page 5 that the film as we know it begins. With the deletion of the more verbally dominated first four pages of the screenplay, American Beauty now opens with a video fragment that is visual, original, and disturbing.3

  Lester’s limbo is curiously related to that of another protagonist in a 1999 film, the unnamed narrator of Fight Club played by Edward Norton. The novel by Chuck Palahniuk, adapted by Joe Uhls and directed by David Fincher, gave rise to a fascinating, provocative, violent drama; it is often scathingly funny and ultimately requires a real leap of faith in psychological projection. Norton is superb in a role that seems derived from two of the previous showcases for his talent: as in Primal Fear, he has two different beings inside of him; as in American History X, he seems to be leading a cult of disenfranchised and aggressive young men but has a change of heart and tries to stop the violence. The voice-over takes us into his stream of consciousness from the beginning (see clip). In the vertiginous title sequence, Tyler (Brad Pitt) holds a gun in the mouth of Norton’s character, three minutes before an explosion. We flash back to Norton in the arms of a burly guy (Meat Loaf) at a support group for men with testicular cancer. And after this opening, the film moves further back in time to Norton as a corporate worker with insomnia, addicted to support groups for cancer and TB, among other things, and able to sleep only after sobbing. When he meets Tyler on an airplane, they decide to develop an underground fight club, where they and other guys exult in the primal appeal of crunch and blood. The end of the film returns to the first shot as Norton watches a corporate building explode. Fight Club culminates in his destroying symbols of what we owe to the twentieth century. Eerily prescient of the Twin Towers crumbling two years later, the closing (and opening) image depicts a destruction that is symbolic: because the financial institutions have records of debt, the characters let them crumble in order to start fresh. Like A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club is about fascism but cannot be called a fascist film.

  FIGURE 8.3  The superimpositions that introduce Fight Club

  American Beauty and Fight Club both reflect and question turn-of-the-millennium anxieties. In each, the protagonist begins as a weak, passive, and physically unassuming consumer. He has a meaningless office job and no sex life, while his spiritual void translates into physical recession. In the course of the film, he transforms himself: physical strength externalizes emotional power as he takes control of his life. Violence is cathartic, whether it is Lester hurling asparagus at the dining room wall or Norton pummeling a sparring partner. Both protagonists quit their jobs and blackmail their bosses. They become sexually potent, liberated by fantasy, which paradoxically awakens them to reality. Toward the end, both heroes have a moral awakening that is redemptive—Lester refusing the temptation of sex with an underage virgin, Norton abandoning the club. American Beauty and Fight Club have surprise endings: one answers the question of who killed Lester, and the other reveals the identity of Tyler. Although both films critique the stagnation of twentieth-century American life—especially consumerism—the endings diverge. Whereas Norton says, “Let it all fall,” Lester embraces the beauty of the world.

  The usual realms in which people find meaning—familial love, religion, art, and creative work—are voided in these movies. A sense of history or memory is absent, which is perhaps why Ricky feels he has to document everything. Lester is happy only when he looks at family photos of a good moment, and after he dies, he remembers the papery quality of his grandmother’s skin. The dull heroes at the beginning of both films are like white bread waiting for something to be sandwiched in—or the buns of Smiley Burgers, where Lester ends up working. In the tradition of Death of a Salesman, they offer a quintessentially American dramatization of frustration, disappointment, and impotence. If American Beauty is about sleepwalking through personal history, Fight Club confronts sleepwalking through global history as well. Once both men let go of their moneymaking identities and embrace downward mobility, the possibility for transcendence appears. Ultimately, American Beauty and Fight Club deal with the deconstruction and reconstruction of our lives, reflecting unresolved tensions at the end of the twentieth century.

  Many of the films in this book focus on male characters who are initially stuck, or suspended, and then activated into cinematic motion—externalized by images like the aquarium of The Graduate, the wet windshield of Taxi Driver, the shower of American Beauty, and the drops of liquid that connect different time frames in The Shipping News. Whether looking through their eyes or engaging with characters via close-ups, we identify with the shaping of an identity. Unlike readers of a novel, we see the hero’s evolution in a constant present tense: in motion pictures, identity is not finite but fluid. If the circular voice-over narration of 1940s thrillers implied inescapable fatality, the films of subsequent decades reflect an existentialist understanding: we are not necessarily born with an identity but create a self—freely and skeptically—through our choices and actions.

  While the focus of most of the films in this book has been on male protagonists, the privileged narrative perspective is occasionally the domain of women. When characters address the camera in an opening scene, the result can be either intimate—as in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977)—or political, as in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), but a voice that exists as a separate track creates a new layer of tension between what we see and hear. Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1974) explores a female subjectivity, as the voice-over belongs to Holly (Sissy Spacek). (In Days of Heaven as well, Malick’s addition of the voice-over of Linda Manz—who plays Richard Gere’s sister—provides a crunchy counterpoint to the film’s lacquered compositions.) In the first image of Badlands, Holly plays with her dog on a bed; as the camera moves back, her voice recalls her arrival in South Dakota with her father (see clip). The second part of the opening shows a garbage truck moving through bucolic suburban streets before we meet Kit (Martin Sheen). Finding a dead dog, this trash collector says to his buddy, “I’ll give you a dollar if you eat this collie.” Malick thus introduces both the off-kilter Kit and the repetition of animal images that gives the film poetic coherence. In the third part of the opening sequence, Holly twirls a baton outdoors while we hear her narration, “Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and back-ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.” Her singsong voice flattens the action, making us aware of the storytelling itself. And since she is narrating from a future point in time, we assume she will survive the tale of young killers on the run. More importantly, the subjectivity suggests that everything we see must be questioned. When Kit balances a broom vertically, he is visually connected to Holly and her baton, even before he notices her on the lawn.

  While these elements depict an American landscape, Malick’s style is markedly European: like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, he uses voice-over as a distancing device that renders the film a reverie. Loosely based on the murderous rampage of real-life teen couple Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate fifteen years earlier, it is a haunting hybrid of the road movie and gangster genres. Like Bonnie and Clyde (1967, for which Malick’s wife served as an assistant), Badlands interrogates the mytho
logizing of the outlaw. Both Warren Beatty’s Clyde and Sheen’s Kit substitute violence for sex, aggressively creating their own legends (including a female sidekick). Kit makes a spoken record “for the D.A. to find”; later talks into a Dictaphone, offering platitudes to younger people; leaves objects in a pail to be found after he is gone; and finally marks a point in the path where his arrest takes place. His gestures are part of a self-conscious pattern, including wiping his fingerprints from a doorknob (after leaving them on everything else in the house they robbed). And before he is arrested, he checks his appearance in the rearview mirror of his car. Kit’s resemblance to James Dean is literal and figurative, as he is obviously patterning his appearance on the movie star. The new names taken by Kit and Holly are James and Priscilla (the latter perhaps invoking the wife of Elvis Presley). Even while robbing people, Kit is extremely polite, a paradoxical blend of minding manners and pointing guns.

  FIGURE 8.4  Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in the opening of Badlands

  From the opening sequence, Malick uses the music of Carl Orff to great contrapuntal effect. Beginning on xylophone, the score is enhanced by drums and—like a bolero—accumulates orchestration and texture. Its tinkling quality suggests a fairy tale, where innocence coexists with brutality. Often aestheticizing the action, the music heightens such images as a stereopticon, a raging fire, Kit and Holly moving down the river, a scarecrow, and a figure in the landscape reminiscent of the Crucifixion. We are also distanced visually—through the use of sepia footage, for instance, and when the camera fails to descend to a storm shelter to reveal the people Kit has shot. Rather, the film offers a progression of death through animals: after the dog left by the garbage truck, we see glimpses of dead fish, a cow, and finally Holly’s father after Kit kills him. Malick singles out not only insects and a caged chicken but also airplane wheels and other images of movement. As the couple moves from the suburbs to the plains, they fulfill the line, “It’s not what you say, but where you go.” Substituting for the garbage truck of the opening, a stolen Cadillac becomes Kit’s emblem of mobility: it presents space as interior landscape; that is, as emptiness.