Who Likes Complex Films? Personality and Preferences for Narrative Complexity (original) (raw)
1 Aesthetics and ‘Active Discovery’: The Pleasure of Moderate Cognitive Challenge in Mass Art
Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Literature, Film & Television. Ed. Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss, 2022
In three parts, this essay explains how artworks, including mass artworks, create aesthetic pleasure through cognitive challenge. Part 1 argues that many theorists regard cognitive challenge as central to aesthetic value. Artists, however, tailor those challenges to the coping potential of their intended audiences. Part 2 argues that even mass audiences enjoy cognitive challenges, which stimulate creative problem solving, incongruity resolution, insight, and stress relief. Part 3 illustrates how Hollywood balances the pleasures of cognitive challenge against competing pressures for easy comprehension by mass audiences. The Philadelphia Story (1940) creates moderate challenges through slightly misshapen narrative structures and inconsistent information.
2022
Boom! 'Trinity' (codename for the first nuclear weapon) and our minds are blown. The five-minute explosion in the outstanding, and standing out, eighth episode of the third season of David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, through its aesthetic qualities and ambiguous narrative affordances, lends itself to an intertextual comparison to Kubrick's Starchild scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But while Kubrick's hovering fetus gleaming in a placental orb emanates a certain optimism about a new beginning for the human race, Lynch's mesmerizing spectacle depicts a dark genesis of the downfall of mankind. It is not only marking the birth of all evil-manifested in the show as Killer BoB (16 July 1945, White Sands, New Mexico)-but also signposting a pivotal moment in the history of televisual seriality (25 June 2017, Showtime). The 'horrifying, horrifyingly beautiful, thought-provoking and thoughtannihilating' (Seitz 2017) episode and its awed detonation scene-'a mesmerizing rush of pure-cut WTF' (Jensen 2017)-is the sublime apex of a complex show that has been building up to, but did not prepare viewers for, this jaw-dropping segment. At this point in time, eight episodes or 409 minutes deep into the third season, the episode bears an unclear relation to all the storyworld construction that the viewer of the series has been engaged in so far. None of the central characters are involved, and nor do we know anything about the scene's connection to the show's setting, events or backstory. Its black-and-white-shot images, which include strange ghostly woodsmen circling around an abandoned convenience store, and a scene of a young girl swallowing an amphibious or insectoid creature-'a hideous frog-cockroach hybrid, seemingly hatched from an egg on the nuked salt flats of New Mexico' (Seitz 2017)-increasingly raise the question of what exactly we are
Wallowing in Dissonance: The Attractiveness of Impossible Puzzle Films
Stories: Screen Narrative in the Digital Era, 2018
There has been no shortage of attention in film studies for the current trend of complex stories and storytelling. Discussing the increasing prominence of perplexing narrative forms across both popular cinema and serialized television, which appears to have emerged from the mid-1990s onwards, scholars have spoken of ‘complex narratives’ (e.g., Staiger 2006; Simons 2008; Mittell 2015), ‘puzzle films’ (Panek 2006; Buckland 2009, 2014a), ‘mind-game films’ (Elsaesser 2009, 2017) and ‘modular’ (Cameron 2008), ‘mind-tricking’ (Klecker 2013) or ‘multiform’ narratives (Campora 2014). These diverse labels have been used to cover not only a wide range of films (from cult hits and mainstream blockbusters to international and historical art cinemas), but have also been accompanied by a variety of approaches. Scholars have used narratological approaches to provide typologies and taxonomies of various complex films, have examined the (film-)philosophical implications of these new narratives, or have focused on the cultural, sociological, industrial, technological, or media-archaeological contexts from which the trend has emerged. In our monograph, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema, we proposed yet another angle, aiming for an in-depth understanding of the effects and experiences of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. We offered a ‘cognitive reconceptualisation’ of story and storytelling complexity in film by analysing how different types of complex movies evoke different kinds and degrees of cognitive puzzlement in their viewers, leading to various viewing effects and experiences. Our inquiry led us to further questions, such as what kinds of interpretive responses complex film narratives evoke and encourage, and how different films have used different modes and degrees of complexity (from moderately complex ‘puzzle’ and ‘twist’ films to highly disruptive and excessively complex story structures, in both popular film and art cinema). This approach singled out a distinct set of movies that we labelled ‘impossible puzzle films’: popular films that evoke pervasively confusing viewing experiences, undermining narrative comprehension by means of various complicating storytelling techniques and the eliciting of dissonant cognitions. Films like Mulholland Drive (2001), Primer (2004), Triangle (2009) or Arrival (2016), we argued, feature notable degrees of narrative confusion, but also employ (counter-)strategies by which they strive to keep viewers interested and immersed in their stories’ challenges and mysteries. When trying to understand the nature of the viewing experiences that complex narratives like impossible puzzle films provide, one question constantly lurks around the corner: Why would anyone be interested in confusing stories? After all, why would viewers spend hours attempting to solve potentially unsolvable puzzles? What pleasure could we take in fictional stories that are manifestly designed to be excessively complex? In the following, excerpted from the final chapter of our book, we would like to freely ponder this question: what makes highly complex stories attractive or at least engaging for (some) viewers?
Last Year at Mulholland Drive: Ambiguous Framings and Framing Ambiguities
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2019
This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and the numerous contrasting interpretations that this film has generated. Rather than offering an(other) interpretation of the film, we aim to investigate some of the reasons why Lynch’s highly complex narrative has gained a cult – if not classic – status in recent film history. To explain the striking variety of (often conflicting) interpretations and responses that the film has evoked, we analyse its complex narrative in terms of its cognitive effects. Our hypothesis is that part of Mulholland Drive’s attractiveness arises from a cognitive oscillation that the film allows between profoundly differing, but potentially equally valid interpretive framings of its enigmatic story: as a perplexing but enticing puzzle, sustained by (post-)classical cues in its narration, and as an artcinematic experience that builds on elements from experimental, surrealist, or other film- and art-historical traditions. The urge to narrativize Mulholland Drive, we argue, is driven by a distinct cognitive hesitation between these conflicting arrays of meaning making. As such, the film has been trailblazing with regards to contemporary cinema, setting stage for the current trend of what critics and scholars have called complex cinema or puzzle films.
CINEJ Cinema Journal, 2023
The deceptive clues in the impossible puzzle film confirm the viewer's internal expectations and allow retrospective attributing. In the film, a transcendental object negates an internal expectation, causing a retrospective blockage. Retrospectivity does not stop there; the transcendental object reinterpreting deceptive clues in the associative area leads to repeated attribution. This article consists of three parts. First, it discusses impossible puzzle films in the context of complex narrative classification. The following section introduces the Jungian concept of synchronicity and illustrates how it works. The article concludes with a case study of Long Day's Journey into Night (2018), which contains more complicated puzzles and explains how mind-game narrative techniques create deceptive clues and induce deceptive retrospective attribution.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2019
In this chapter I review six contributions to the field of film theory published in 2018: Carl Plantinga's Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford University Press); Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh University Press); Nicholas Godfrey’s The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood (Rutgers University Press); Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis’ The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema’s Most Celebrated Era (Bloomsbury Academic); Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (Edinburgh University Press); and Gina Marchetti’s Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (University of Hawaii Press).
I film puzzle sono esempi di narrazione complessa, che è diventata uno dei nuovi importanti modi in cui il cinema si è evoluto, in particolare dagli anni '90, fornendo al pubblico trame sempre più difficili da capire. Questo Dossier tratta due questioni distinte ma correlate. La prima parte si concentrerà sulle strategie narrative, cioè cercherà di descrivere cosa significa "complessità impossibile" e come i film riescono ad esprimerla. La seconda parte prenderà in considerazione le strategie degli spettatori, ovvero cosa fanno gli spettatori per affrontare il compito di trovare un significato e svelare gli "enigmi" che si trovano ad affrontare.
Over the past two decades, Hollywood cinema has seen the proliferation of disruptive narrative techniques that were previously thought to be exclusive to the realms of (post)modern literature and art cinema. Most scholarly contributions on contemporary complex cinema have been classifications, attempting to position these films relative to the “classical” mode of narration. This article sidesteps these efforts at categorization and, by offering a cognitive approach to cinematic narrative complexity, aims to provide an overview of the mental processes that complex films elicit in their viewers. Using Torben Grodal’s PECMA flow model, we theorize how the experience of complexity arises out of a confrontation with plot devices that disrupt the embodied viewing process by breaching or subverting familiar narrative conventions. In conclusion, we suggest five different scenarios—all following from different PECMA flow disruptions—and describe how one of them can affect the experience of complex (post)classical cinema.
Puzzle Plots in TV Serials: The Challenges for Enigma-Driven Storytelling in Long-Running Formats
Panoptikum, 2019
Cinem a of Puzz les Introduction: Definitions and Concepts 1 So-called "puzzle films" have been very successful in the last three decades and have attracted considerable critical and academic attention. With the recent shift of funds, talents, and star power to the production of TV serials, the question arises how well the particular kind of narrative complexity associated with puzzle plots may thrive in long-running formats spanning entire seasons 2. In order to give a tentative answer to this question, I will in this article undertake a comparative analysis of three works that may be considered typical examples of puzzle plots: the feature film Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos, 1997, Alejandro Amenábar), and the TV serials Westworld (2016-, HBO, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy) and Dark (2017-, Netflix, Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar). But before embarking on this analysis, some preliminary considerations about how to define narrative complexity in general and the puzzle plot in particular may be in order. 1 I would like to thank Joseph Swann for the revision of the English text. 2 I use the term "TV serial" (and not "TV series") for shows whose stories span whole seasons.
1. Screen Narrative in the Digital Era
2018
Wordless storytelling is natural. The imagetic representation of sequences of brain events, which occurs in brains simpler than ours, is the stuff of which stories are made.-Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (2000, 188) "Stories" are inescapably central to modern media discourse, not only in traditionally narrative entertainment media, such as television, cinema, and theater, but also in social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, blogging), and "new media" (online gaming, VR). Furthermore, telling or having "a story" is widely deemed essential in advertising, commerce, and social life. Not surprisingly, teaching and coaching in storytelling has become a major industry. "Creative writing" courses are heavily subscribed and advice is ubiquitous. Storytelling was clearly of major importance in the development of cinema and television, as well as new forms of printed and graphic media, during the early twentieth century. But even if these media were new (or, more accurately, new inflections of existing screen and print forms), storytelling is as old and universal as any sense of consciousness, according to the neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio. He further suggests that the "natural pre-verbal occurrence of storytelling" may be why drama and later written narratives emerged, "and why a good part of humanity is currently hooked on movie theatres and television screens" (Damasio 2000, 188). For Damasio, echoing what Hugo Münsterberg (1916) claimed just over a century ago, "movies are the closest external representation of the prevailing storytelling that goes on in our minds" (188). 1 However, in trying to account for "the making of core consciousness," his concern is less with the mind/cinema analogy than locating storytelling in an evolutionary sequence that starts with "mapping," which "probably begins relatively early both in terms of evolution and in terms of the complexity of the neural structures required to create narratives" (189). He therefore concludes that "telling stories precedes language, since it is in fact a condition for language, and it is based not just in the cerebral cortex but elsewhere in the brain" (189). But if it is a precondition for language itself, then a more developed storytelling ability is also a defining feature of what we call "culture." In his