A Telugu movie I watched recently has had me thinking about unreliable narrators …

I can see how an unreliable narrator would work easily in fiction — if the book is in first-person perspective, then we rely on the narrator for all the information we receive and so, if the narrator misleads us (either intentionally or unintentionally) we’d be none the wiser.

But in movies, while the whole movie might follow a single character, we still get a slightly more omniscient viewpoint — while we do see what the character sees and who they interact with, given the medium, I’d expect the reactions of others to be not filtered through the character’s own viewpoint.

The most memorable unreliable narrator movies that I can think of are “The Sixth Sense”, “Fight Club”, “The Usual Suspects”, and “Memento”. And most of these work because the narrator themselves does not know that they are unreliable — what we see is what they “know” at a given moment. The only exception would be “The Usual Suspects”, but since the story there is narrated by someone, what we see is what they say. So that works.

The movie which prompted all these thoughts had somebody being portrayed as a kind and generous human being — they weren’t motivated by money, they help people, they don’t drink or gamble, and so on. But later on, we learn that the person is not at all what they seemed originally.

Now, I do realize that people sometimes hide their true-selves. They show one face to the world while hiding who they really are. But I would expect there to be some clues if you look close enough — especially in a movie since that involves the viewer more and makes them feel satisfied at having spotted the clues when the big reveal comes 😛

For example, if somebody pretends to love a person, of course, they’d call that person and declare their love all the time. But unless they both had a common circle of acquaintances, I wouldn’t expect the person pretending to be in love to go around telling everybody how much they are in love. That’s just too much work in my opinion 🙂

This particular movie had certain elements like that which made no sense later on when the big reveal came. They positioned one person as good, as somebody who wanted to help people. They positioned another person as bad, as somebody who would do anything for money. And then at the end they just go ahead and say, “Oh, the good guy is bad, and the bad guy actually would do anything to help someone in trouble.” It just didn’t work for me …

Yes, this might not make much sense to anybody reading since some context is missing — it probably is just too much of a stream-of-consciousness thing. But since I’m thinking so much about it at the moment, I figured I’d just jot it down … 😛

#Movies #Structure #Reflections