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. Cover Half title Title Copyrights Dedication 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 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 Death, vision, and embodied spectatorship Visible gestures and invisible viewing subjects in The Sixth Sense Light, perspective, and the materiality of the embodied observer in The Others Sense hierarchies and perceptual reconfigurations 2 Solving Things Differently Mental pathologies and embodied experience in Memento and Fight Club Haptic openings, tactile beginnings Tactile epistemologies and embodied knowledge in Memento Corporeal estrangement and embodied experience in Fight Club Productive pathologies revisited: Characters with mental conditions and embodied spectators 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 Spatiotemporal (dis)orientation in complex cinematic worlds Bodily displacement and being lost Feeling coherence: Atmosphere, immersion, and perceptual maps Cognitive riddles, immersive pleasures Conclusion: Play It Again – Games with the Mind or with the Body and the Senses? Notes References Films Television Index