Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film
The defense of the Imagined Seeing Thesis in earlier chapters was restricted to the thesis applied only to “objective” shots and sequences. But, subjective shots and sequences of various kinds are commonplace in most movies, and critics of the Imagined Seeing Thesis doubt that this variety can be accommodated by any reasonable extension of the core claim. In this chapter, it is shown how the framework of the core claim can be modified to deal with these “subjective” cases. Of special interest are mixed cases of a type that the author calls “impersonal but subjectively inflected shots.” These are shots that are not presented from any character’s optical perspective, but where aspects of the shot represent qualities of some character’s concurrent experiences. The chapter also discusses the narration of Fight Club, a movie that trades extensively on ambiguities of subjectivity, ambiguities created by an extensive use of impersonal but subjectively inflected shots.
Keywords: transparent narration, epistemological twist, POV shots, dream sequences, subjectively inflected, unmarked subjectivity shots, epistemic structure, Fight Club
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