Deceptive Detection and an Inverted Quest: Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (original) (raw)
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Interfacing Intuition, or, the GUIness of the Detective’s Gaze
How do videogames tell mystery stories? Bereft of the characters or authorial presence that serve to mediate the work of detection in cinematic or literary mysteries, videogames struggle to endow their players with the ability to pick up on relevant environmental clues in order to piece together the story. In interactive media, the epistemological conceit of the sharply observational gaze—mediated so easily through the intuition of an intervening detective figure in mystery stories in other media—becomes a more fraught problem. In the absence of the types of narration available to cinema and literature, games have turned to innovative solutions in the audiovisual design of user interfaces to solve this problem, offering visual translations of intuitive observation. Tracing a line from the 1980s to the 2010s, this paper makes the case for relevance of visual analysis in UI design when tackling both theoretical issues of the player-avatar relation and historical issues of cross-medial genre evolution. Through the close examination of two historically disparate case studies—The Curse of Crowley Manor (Adventure International, 1981) and Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (Frogwares, 2014)—this paper argues that mystery-based games have developed a rich and medium-specific audiovisual language for placing players in the detective’s gaze, consistently exploiting a dichotomy between “realist” phenomenal fidelity and a more functional focalization of attention. This technique originally emerged from, and remains distinctly grounded within, the technological limitations of early graphical adventure games such as Crowley Manor, in which hardware constraints necessitated splitting players’ access to scenes between descriptive images and attention-focusing text. However, despite its origin, the benefits of this UI technique have granted it long-lasting popularity within the videogame medium—and, more recently, its basic conceit has travelled with the genre across media, influencing the visual language of such contemporary non-game mystery fare as Sherlock (Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, 2010–). A history of videogame poetics reveals that the problems posed by mysteries are “solved” by aligning players’ observations and actions with the mindset of an expert detective player-character—and that these solutions have had wide-ranging generic effects within the realm of moving images.
The genre mask: Rhetorical style and audience activation in the investigation film
2015
The Genre Mask discusses the use of genre and generic tropes as a mask for hidden or subversive meaning held beneath the familiar aesthetic of genre-observant film productions. This idea is approached from the perspective of genre classification and identification, and for the purposes of this study the Investigation Film genre, which includes detective films, films noir and police procedurals, comes under scrutiny largely because of its links with social realist cinema. Using several films in the corpus for close reading, the study charts the progression of the genre as films navigate its resistance and malleability to social preoccupations, before using this tension to describe how genre can be used to construct horizontality between film and viewer.
This paper examines this view of "unreliable" or "little narrative" or "incredulity toward metanarrative" in Martin Amis's novel Night Train as an anti-detective novel. In so doing, the paper falls into two parts. The first part focuses upon the convention of traditional "reliable" or "metanarrative" in a typical traditional detective story, in which Mike Hoolihan as a detective investigates Jennifer Faulkner's suicide by collecting all the possible evidences and then examining them in a chronological linear way to solve her enigmatic death: who has killed her? Why was she murdered? If it is suicide, why has she ended her life? However, the paper also discusses that the way Mike passionately attempts to solve Jennifer's mysterious death is not possible due not only to lack of evidences but also to the fact that there occurs various interpretations about her death, including Mike's her one, which, after a while, turns into a psychological evaluation of the case with her own emotional involvement. Hence Jennifer's death remains a mystery from the beginning to the end in the novel. This situation obviously defies the expectation of her father Tom as in the traditional sense because why Tom hires Mike as an "exceptional interrogator" with an outstanding "paperwork" in the past is to clarify the case and then appease his anxiety, as well as the mystery of his daughter's death. Through his representation of Mike in such a condition, Amis apparently illuminates that it is almost impossible to create a detective story with a final legitimate total meaning and resolution as in a typical traditional detective novel in an age based on fragmentation, uncertainty, doubt, interruption, lack of authority, and self-expression.
a Fractured Viewer: Paralysis in Desire
Hitchcock’s Rear window (1954) reveals to the viewer a crucial aspect of Hitchcock’s films and the medium in general. The condition of the protagonist in the film, (Jeff) i.e., his state of paralysis is the state which is always occupied by the spectator. (One must note that viewership is accompanied by a consciousness of being a spectator.) Paralysis becomes the adjective that the cinema can never get rid of, owing to the virtue of the physicality it presumes in the mode of its production and consumption. The seductive project that Jeff takes on single-handedly in this film is always accompanied by the condensation of the subject into the object, which implicates traversal across two symbolic registers — traversal and not switching. The morphing of the subject into the object is lubricated by the process of identification, which in film, unlike other media, is always divided between spatiality and temporality. The film as an artifice is located in the same symbolic register as the viewer while the objects and events in the film get placed inside the former during the process of spectatorship. The only way in which the object (spectator (Jeff) ) desires is by changing the directionality of the gaze. However, the presence of two different registers alters the directionality of the map of desires, which raises the question of identity (and identification) of the objects located on the map. In order to map these changes, one must inevitably question as to how and when the viewer shakes their hands with Jeff. The key to the revelation of the process of identification lies in the handshake, which will also let one crank and open the window at Jeff’s apartment.
Behind the Cigarette Smoke: Hiding the Truth, Transmediality in Noir and Neo-noir Creations
Mikołaj Marks MA thesis, 2019
This dissertation concerns the subject of hidden truth in noir fiction and how the genre forms a complex, connected puzzle using transmediality. The first chapter is an introduction to the three key terms: truth, transmediality and noir. The second chapter offers an analysis of a noir movie Out of the Past from 1947, directed by Jacques Tourneur. The subchapter to this part is a look at pulp fiction and Batman graphic novels. The third chapter is a close reading of James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia 1987. The next subchapter focuses on Curtis Hanson’s L.A Confidential 1997 and David Fincher’s Seven 1995. The fourth chapter concerns the Coen brothers film from 2001: The Man Who Wasn’t There. This part is completed with an insight into Ridley Scott’s movie Black Rain 1989. Final chapter is about video game BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea 2013, and is closed with a look at the VR game L.A Noire: The VR Case Files 2017. Conclusion sums up the elements of noir transmedial puzzle found in the process of analysis.