I saw Inception on Saturday, and the top question I had going into the movie was probably, Am I going to understand it?
The director, Christopher Nolan, is known for making movies that are difficult to grasp quickly. In The Prestige, this was because key information was revealed only very slowly. But in Following and Memento, whole scenes and sequences appear out of order; Memento is still a prime example of non-linear narrative. Just this past week, I watched Following, Nolan’s first real feature, and was happy to find something worth pulling apart.
Following is about a man who calls himself “Bill”, though since identities are fluid in the film, he’s identified as “The Young Man” in the credits. A bit of a lost soul, Bill becomes involved with Cobb, a rather philosophical burglar, and over the course of time begins to emulate him.
I say “over the course of time” and not “over the course of the film” because Following is pretty high on the non-linear index. Which is to say, within the first five minutes of the movie, you’ve seen glimpses of at least four distinct parts of the story. The movie settles down after that to dole out full scenes set in different stages, but still moves around in time so that within the first thirty minutes, we’ve revisited a few different parts of the story at least once.
The question I’ll pose here today is whether the non-linearity of Following is a good thing or a bad thing. That’s right: thumbs up or thumbs down, no middle ground.
To answer, let’s first consider whether the non-linearity is a necessary aspect of the movie given the theme. I take the most important theme of the movie to be how a person without many ethics or scruples, in this case Cobb, can come to define reality for someone without a sense of purpose or self, in this case Bill. Even at most proactive, Bill seems adrift – when he finally changes his appearance and sheds his grimy t-shirt for a suit, it looks tentative and arbitrary; when he upsets a woman, he isn’t enough of a genuine asshole not to care when she marches off. (Training Day was another sharp dramatization of this theme, with Denzel Washington spending most of the movie manipulating Ethan Hawke because the rookie cop doesn’t trust his own judgment.)
I don’t see anything here begging for a scrambled timeline, so I think it’s safe to say that the theme didn’t really force Nolan’s hand in making the film non-linear. That aside, was the non-linearity a good stylistic choice anyway, even if it wasn’t necessary?
Of course, we’d have to look at the consequences of that choice to answer. “Consequences” here is a broad category that includes, for one, the way that Nolan had to make other stylistic choices to compensate for the confusion created by the non-linearity. One is that Bill has at least three or four different distinct appearances. At the very beginning of the film, Bill is introduced in a suit with a dark shirt as he’s telling a policeman his story. From there, Bill flashes back to three other periods, which we know because he looks different in each of them, appearing as grimy Bill, suited Bill, and black-eyed suited Bill.
Nolan has varied Bill’s appearance in part, I assume, to help the audience keep the phases of the story straight. (Nolan being a mainstream directory, I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t ever going to simply let the audience puzzle together all the scenes with versions of Bill that all looked the same. If you want a movie that difficult to understand, I recommend Primer.) As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson note in their textbook “Film Art” (7th ed., pg. 79), this same technique of differentiation is used in Sliding Doors to mark the difference between two versions of the same woman (using hair length and a bandage).
What’s remarkable here is that time itself in the film has ceased to mean much, so that it needs a physical manifestation. It reminds me of those time-space diagrams where we have to consider time as a physical dimension, which is when you think about it a mighty strange transformation.
In Memento, the transitions between phases are less noticeable because Nolan sets up one sequence of plot developments in black and white and another in color. It’s so intuitive – we’ve already been trained by the conventions of flashbacks to accept different tints and effects as different times – that Nolan could then make the colored scenes run in reverse order, and still keep it coherent.
Following, however, is all in black and white, so that Bill’s appearance is our primary cue to the point of the story being shown. This means that jumps in time are often felt more keenly, as though you were in the mind of someone who is completely discombobulated. That’s a cogent effect, but it seems more appropriate for the story of the amnesiac protagonist of Memento. Bill is only moderately discombobulated; he knows what sequence things are happening in. He’s ineffectual, not confused.
Ironically, Inception, which is all about entering dreams, would seem ripe for mashed-up time, but the new movie isn’t much more non-linear than your average thriller movie. The film does splice in a few frames earlier in the movie that are only put into context later (look for a shot of Marion Cotillard laying her head on a train track), but there aren’t whole scenes played out that aren’t in order after the opening sequence, if you don’t count clearly demarcated flashbacks. (It’s pretty common to have an opening sequence that happens later in the story, only to have the plot catch up with it later -- an “enframed flashback structure” is how David Bordwell describes it -- so Inception isn’t unusual in this regard.) The end result is that you are almost never asking yourself when the scene is happening in Inception or having a problem understanding the causality.
Contrast with Following and Memento; with both of them, you spend most of the movie figuring out exactly how A led to B and later C. Which leads us to another consequence of the choice to go non-linear: the audience spends most of the movie with their brains fully activated. Nolan has said he was looking for a film noir effect:
You might think from what I’ve written that I’d prefer Following to be more straightforward, but actually, I think it would be poorer for it; the raw story material, while much better than the average movie, would probably be a little weak if told sequentially. More to the point, like Memento, Following is hard to assess outside of its novel structure, since it would be a very different movie told in order. In both, it seems as though the non-linearity is actually the most important part of the movie, beyond other considerations. We’re constantly asking ourselves “What the hell’s going on?” and the attention we would pay to other details eases off a bit; the gaping hole in our understanding is the most salient aspect.
I suppose I could complain about that, but there are too many other cookie-cutter movies that are terribly predictable, where causality is consistently obvious. In fact, it’s nice to have a change. Actually, it’s a pleasure to be confused.
The director, Christopher Nolan, is known for making movies that are difficult to grasp quickly. In The Prestige, this was because key information was revealed only very slowly. But in Following and Memento, whole scenes and sequences appear out of order; Memento is still a prime example of non-linear narrative. Just this past week, I watched Following, Nolan’s first real feature, and was happy to find something worth pulling apart.
Following is about a man who calls himself “Bill”, though since identities are fluid in the film, he’s identified as “The Young Man” in the credits. A bit of a lost soul, Bill becomes involved with Cobb, a rather philosophical burglar, and over the course of time begins to emulate him.
I say “over the course of time” and not “over the course of the film” because Following is pretty high on the non-linear index. Which is to say, within the first five minutes of the movie, you’ve seen glimpses of at least four distinct parts of the story. The movie settles down after that to dole out full scenes set in different stages, but still moves around in time so that within the first thirty minutes, we’ve revisited a few different parts of the story at least once.
The question I’ll pose here today is whether the non-linearity of Following is a good thing or a bad thing. That’s right: thumbs up or thumbs down, no middle ground.
To answer, let’s first consider whether the non-linearity is a necessary aspect of the movie given the theme. I take the most important theme of the movie to be how a person without many ethics or scruples, in this case Cobb, can come to define reality for someone without a sense of purpose or self, in this case Bill. Even at most proactive, Bill seems adrift – when he finally changes his appearance and sheds his grimy t-shirt for a suit, it looks tentative and arbitrary; when he upsets a woman, he isn’t enough of a genuine asshole not to care when she marches off. (Training Day was another sharp dramatization of this theme, with Denzel Washington spending most of the movie manipulating Ethan Hawke because the rookie cop doesn’t trust his own judgment.)
I don’t see anything here begging for a scrambled timeline, so I think it’s safe to say that the theme didn’t really force Nolan’s hand in making the film non-linear. That aside, was the non-linearity a good stylistic choice anyway, even if it wasn’t necessary?
Of course, we’d have to look at the consequences of that choice to answer. “Consequences” here is a broad category that includes, for one, the way that Nolan had to make other stylistic choices to compensate for the confusion created by the non-linearity. One is that Bill has at least three or four different distinct appearances. At the very beginning of the film, Bill is introduced in a suit with a dark shirt as he’s telling a policeman his story. From there, Bill flashes back to three other periods, which we know because he looks different in each of them, appearing as grimy Bill, suited Bill, and black-eyed suited Bill.
Nolan has varied Bill’s appearance in part, I assume, to help the audience keep the phases of the story straight. (Nolan being a mainstream directory, I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t ever going to simply let the audience puzzle together all the scenes with versions of Bill that all looked the same. If you want a movie that difficult to understand, I recommend Primer.) As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson note in their textbook “Film Art” (7th ed., pg. 79), this same technique of differentiation is used in Sliding Doors to mark the difference between two versions of the same woman (using hair length and a bandage).
What’s remarkable here is that time itself in the film has ceased to mean much, so that it needs a physical manifestation. It reminds me of those time-space diagrams where we have to consider time as a physical dimension, which is when you think about it a mighty strange transformation.
In Memento, the transitions between phases are less noticeable because Nolan sets up one sequence of plot developments in black and white and another in color. It’s so intuitive – we’ve already been trained by the conventions of flashbacks to accept different tints and effects as different times – that Nolan could then make the colored scenes run in reverse order, and still keep it coherent.
Following, however, is all in black and white, so that Bill’s appearance is our primary cue to the point of the story being shown. This means that jumps in time are often felt more keenly, as though you were in the mind of someone who is completely discombobulated. That’s a cogent effect, but it seems more appropriate for the story of the amnesiac protagonist of Memento. Bill is only moderately discombobulated; he knows what sequence things are happening in. He’s ineffectual, not confused.
Ironically, Inception, which is all about entering dreams, would seem ripe for mashed-up time, but the new movie isn’t much more non-linear than your average thriller movie. The film does splice in a few frames earlier in the movie that are only put into context later (look for a shot of Marion Cotillard laying her head on a train track), but there aren’t whole scenes played out that aren’t in order after the opening sequence, if you don’t count clearly demarcated flashbacks. (It’s pretty common to have an opening sequence that happens later in the story, only to have the plot catch up with it later -- an “enframed flashback structure” is how David Bordwell describes it -- so Inception isn’t unusual in this regard.) The end result is that you are almost never asking yourself when the scene is happening in Inception or having a problem understanding the causality.
Contrast with Following and Memento; with both of them, you spend most of the movie figuring out exactly how A led to B and later C. Which leads us to another consequence of the choice to go non-linear: the audience spends most of the movie with their brains fully activated. Nolan has said he was looking for a film noir effect:
In a compelling story of this genre we are continually being asked to rethink our assessment of the relationship between the various characters, and I decided to structure my story in such a way as to emphasize the audience's incomplete understanding of each new scene as it is first presented.The problem I see with this explanation is that non-linearity is so puzzling that we are barely able to understand, much less “rethink”, the characters’ relationships. We spend a lot of the time in a mental workout just to fit together everything that we’re learning.
You might think from what I’ve written that I’d prefer Following to be more straightforward, but actually, I think it would be poorer for it; the raw story material, while much better than the average movie, would probably be a little weak if told sequentially. More to the point, like Memento, Following is hard to assess outside of its novel structure, since it would be a very different movie told in order. In both, it seems as though the non-linearity is actually the most important part of the movie, beyond other considerations. We’re constantly asking ourselves “What the hell’s going on?” and the attention we would pay to other details eases off a bit; the gaping hole in our understanding is the most salient aspect.
I suppose I could complain about that, but there are too many other cookie-cutter movies that are terribly predictable, where causality is consistently obvious. In fact, it’s nice to have a change. Actually, it’s a pleasure to be confused.
