[Perry] Using An Unreliable Narrator

Another guest post from Perry, who is well on his way to earning co-blogger status (it’s mostly a certificate made from an old cereal box and drawn in crayon … VERY prosh).  Loved this one, and I’ve adored all the movies he’s got listed where the unreliable narrator is done RIGHT.

~Tami

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The following post contains spoilers for the movie Total Recall (original and the recent remake). Viewer discretion is completely unadvised.

So I recently caught the Total Recall remake in theaters and given the inevitable comparison between that and the original version (with Ahnald), it sparked a few thoughts that I wanted to share.

Do you know why an unreliable narrator works?

…Wait, scratch that. Do you know what an unreliable narrator is?

Just for a quick recap, an unreliable narrator is a story-telling device where the main viewpoint of the story is one that’s compromised. Either the viewpoint of the story (usually a person/entity/thing) is knowingly lying to you or unintentionally misdirecting you because they themselves don’t know the truth.

Some notable examples of this device used effectively in film would be something like Fight Club, or The Usual Suspects, or Memento.

The original Total Recall was a great example of this. The story is set in the future where an everyday kind of guy goes to a place called Rekall which offers to implant memories into your brain to help you get away from the day-to-day. So our hero, Hauser, decides to be implanted with memories of being a spy…except in the middle of the implantation procedure, there’s a problem due to the discovery of previously erased memories. Hauser then discovers that he was an undercover agent all along and gets embroiled in a struggle to fight for the rebels from Mars.

Throughout the movie, and past the ending, the audience shares in Hauser’s doubts. Is all this really happening? Was he truly an undercover agent all along? Or is everything we see just part of the Rekall and it’s all taking place inside his head?

The movie ends before that becomes clear and in a large part, that’s what made it successful. A clear argument could be made for either case, leaving it up to you to decide what sort of story you wanted it to be.

Fast forward to 2012 and the recent remake.

The movie essentially follows the same plot. There’s no Mars this time, but there are still rebels, and there’s still an everyday guy named Hauser who’s sick of his job and there’s still a place called Rekall, offering to implant you with fake memories.

What it ALSO has, are scenes that Hauser is not a part of…and that immediately destroys the point of having an unreliable narrator.

See, the point of having an unreliable narrator is so the audience can see the story through their eyes and therefore, share the characters difficulty in figuring out what’s real and what’s an illusion. The second you introduce things happening without the main character (a scene where two other important characters are talking about what to do about Hauser), you eliminate the unreliability.

Sure, you could claim that “well, this is what those characters would be doing if this WAS all inside Hauser’s head,” but that’s a cop-out and we all know it.

Effective use of the unreliable narrator is the equivalent of tapping your audience on the shoulder and then smashing them in the face with a chunk of wood that has the words, “ASTONISHING REVELATION!” burnt onto it.

If you include scenes that the main character’s not a part of and can’t be aware of, you’re essentially telling your audience when to duck.

If you take the wonderful example The Usual Suspects left for us and included a scene that was NOT  told to us by Kevin Spacey, you’d be depriving yourself of the chance to smack the audience in the face with a bit of wood…and, really, who wants to pass that up?

So remember, if you choose to use an unreliable narrator, stay with them throughout the story.

Stay inside their restricted viewpoint in order to keep the audience guessing as to what’s going on until the right moment.

…and start practicing that home run swing >.>”

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[Perry] Judging a Book by its Cover