Making Sense of Mind-Game Films: Narrative Complexity, Embodiment, and the Senses

Description

Mind-game films and other complex narratives have been a prominent phenomenon of the cinematic landscape during the period 1990-2010, when films like The Sixth Sense, Memento, Fight Club and Source Code became critical and commercial successes, often acquiring a cult status with audiences. With their multiple story lines, unreliable narrators, ambiguous twist endings, and paradoxical worlds, these films challenge traditional ways of narrative comprehension and in many cases require and reward multiple viewings. But how can me make sense of films that don't always make sense the way we are used to? While most scholarship has treated these complex films as narrative puzzles that audiences solve with their cognitive skills, Making Sense of Mind-Game Films offers a fresh perspective by suggesting that they appeal to the body and the senses in equal measures. Mind-game films tell stories about crises between body, mind and world, and about embodied forms of knowing and subjective ways of being-in-the-world. Through compelling in-depth case studies of popular mind-game films, the book explores how these complex narratives take their (embodied) spectators with them into such crises. The puzzling effect generated by these films stems from a conflict between what we think and what we experience, between what we know and what we feel to be true, and between what we see and what we sense. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Complex narratives in contemporary cinema Defining mind-game films Typical features of mind-game films: Subjectivity, deception, and matters of the mind Solving complex narrative puzzles Feeling complex narrative textures Film, phenomenology, and theories of embodied spectatorship Making sense of films that don’t always make sense Chapter 1: Seeing What Others Cannot See Epistemological uncertainty and visual complexity in The Sixth Sense and The Others Complex twist films and the disavowal of death The twist sequence in The Sixth Sense The twist sequence in The Others Death, vision, and embodied spectatorship Phantom bodies Visible gestures and invisible viewing subjects in The Sixth Sense The limits of vision Beyond vision: The knowledge of the other senses Tactility in cinematic spectatorship Light, perspective, and the materiality of the embodied observer in The Others Seeing and being in the dark Materially making sense of the world The touch and texture of light Sense hierarchies and perceptual reconfigurations Chapter 2: Solving Things Differently Mental pathologies and embodied experience in Memento and Fight Club Haptic openings, tactile beginnings Haptic and optical visuality in Memento’s opening sequence Tactility and immersion in Fight Club’s opening sequence Tactile epistemologies and embodied knowledge in Memento Leonard’s epistemological anchor: The feel of the world Habit and routine Tacit skills and skillful coping Hidden from sight, revealed through touch: Material traces in Leonard’s mnemonic system Haptic entanglements Corporeal estrangement and embodied experience in Fight Club Reality, imagination, and hallucination Tactile alienation Kinetic styles of being Visceral unease The right kind of touch Productive pathologies revisited: Characters with mental conditions and embodied spectators Chapter 3: Getting Lost, Sensing the Way Infinite worlds and impossible loops in Possible Worlds and Source Code Setting the scene, settling into a world: Bodily orientation in (cinematic) space Architecture and immersion: The opening passage of Possible Worlds Bodily orientation in cinematic space: Entering the world of Source Code Spatiotemporal (dis)orientation in complex cinematic worlds Spatiotemporal complexity Two modes of (dis)orientation Bodily displacement and being lost Not knowing where we are in Possible Worlds Lost in the loop of Source Code Feeling coherence: Atmosphere, immersion, and perceptual maps Atmosphere and unity in Possible Worlds Sameness, variation, and moments that matter in Source Code Cognitive riddles, immersive pleasures Conclusion: Play It Again Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 References Films Television Index