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Cinematic Presupposition, Race, and Epistemological Twist Films

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-6245.2010.01432.x

1540-6245

Dan Flory,

American Sports and Literature

One of the more intriguing aspects of George O. Wilson's main examples of what he calls epistemological twist films—Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) and The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001)—is that their revelatory narrative turns (or twists, as Wilson calls them) near story's end disclose unanticipated psychological complexities concerning their main characters. Jack (Edward Norton), the narrator of Fight Club, eventually realizes, as do the viewers, that he is the victim of a form of mental illness, the effects of which he was unaware, and that lie at the root of the narrative's unreliability. In contrast, The Others reveals that its main character, Grace (Nicole Kidman), has been operating under a unique form of supernatural self-deception: she does not realize until the very end of the film that she and her children are the ghosts in the story, and that the intruding others are actual flesh-and-blood human beings attempting to move into the house that she and her sun-shy offspring haunt. These films' narrative turns involve insightful character twists that depend crucially on how human beings (or creatures like them) can be deluded about themselves or the world around them. Moreover, the analysis of such turns can expose surprising features of how cinematic narrative may deceive us. In this article, I explore whether the character Sal (Danny Aiello) in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) is deceived in ways similar to those exhibited by the characters above about his own beliefs concerning the African Americans who frequent his pizzeria, and whether a viewer's sudden realization of Sal's beliefs constitutes an epistemological twist. To accomplish this task, I extend Wilson's theory by considering its implications for the idea of race. Doing so, I argue, clarifies the function of certain presumptions regarding this vexing concept insofar as they operate in mainstream commercial film. Such an investigation also adds to the idea of an epistemological twist film in a plausible, if perhaps unexpected way, while permitting a more reasoned and detached exploration of troubling matters that touch us all. Section I outlines the features of Wilson's theory that are relevant to my investigation. Section II argues for a kind of epistemological twist film beyond the two types Wilson describes, one that does not depend on unreliable narrative but instead relies on what might be broadly termed misperceived narrative. Sections III and IV consider what theorizing this third kind of epistemological twist film means for our understanding of cinematic presuppositions, spectatorship, and imagined seeing in cinematic narrative, particularly with regard to viewer sensibilities involving race. In the last two sections, I also briefly speculate about the possible implications of such matters for our broader experience of the world.