Topic 2 - Narrative structure

 Brandon Wright

Prof. Saphire

COM 126

10/7/20

Narrative structure in Memento and Adaptation

            Both of these films display an importance to narrative structure to enable the viewer to get. better understanding of the story at hand. Memento is the more interesting film in my opinion because not only is the plot of the film told completely backwards, it also has contrasting color and black and white scenes. This change in the color of the film reveals how the story is taking place relative to time, the color scenes mean are going backwards and the black and white ones go forward. In the film Adaptation we see a different approach to narrative structure by having the main character, Charlie, having his thoughts constantly narrated throughout the film and how self aware the film was of itself.

            As we are told this story through the first person perspective of Charlie the audience also gets a deeper look into his inner self, seeing the demons he is constantly battling with while writing the screenplay. Unlike a third person narrator, like in the film The Royal Tenenbaums, we only know the information from the narrator that is accessible to Charlie, meaning whatever he doesn't know the audience also will not know. The film is also extremely self aware, which I really enjoyed, by being about a screenwriter writing a script about his life that we are watching unfold in front of our very eyes. There was one instance that stood out to me when Charlie was attending the screenwriters conference in New York and the man speaking said that narrations in movies were a very bad thing and should have no place in a film, all while Charlie is narrating the story while he talks. The only fault I really saw in this film were its characters, I found Charlie interesting but his brother and most other characters felt one dimensional and that there was not much to any of them. The side characters to me seemed more like plot devices helped to further the story along instead of intricate parts to the film itself.

            Memento uses a method of film making which was popularized after Pulp Fiction, which is an out of order narrative that does not place the scenes chronologically. This form of storytelling forces the watcher to put the pieces together in their head and helps them try to figure what is going to happen before it even happens. In the textbook it compares Memento to a film by the name of irreversible because they both have a similar structure in terms of how they place their scenes in non chronological order. This is a stylistic choice to "Challenge viewers to relearn how to align expectation and decipher narrative context" (135). Personally, I feel this is necessary for more films to do now because viewers are not challenged enough to think critically about a story as they watch a movie with how linear most films are nowadays.