Misère nim, the game played several times in the course of Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad is a combinatorial game–that is, a two-player game with no hidden information and nothing left to chance. Last Year at Marienbad, a combinatorial game for cinema, might be a source text for a type of narrative that I find compelling but hard to talk about–that is, not painful or embarrassing, but maybe a little hard to put into words. They’re narratives in the shape of puzzles–ideally, puzzles that have no solution, or that have multiple solutions. Or maybe it’s that they hesitate, not resolving themselves, authorizing multiple readings simultaneously.
Of course this kind of ambiguity often surfaces in the middle of a story, only to be resolved by the ending (this is the pattern we’re accustomed to as viewers/readers: confusion/doubt/uncertainty contributes to tension, which is eventually relieved by explanation or action and the release of tension). In these cases, I’m really happier with the story up to that point–that is, until the story unambiguously tilts in the direction of one possible meaning, foreclosing its other forking paths. Here I’m thinking particularly of The Third Man, which is beautiful through and through except I always sort of wish that Orson Welles would never show up. Vertigo is another very good example of finely balanced creepiness completely spoiled by an overabundance of dramatic irony–we know too much after the ruse has been revealed in that awful letter-writing scene.
Only a very few stories care to hold onto their multiplicity (among films, there’s Lost Highway, maybe, or L’Avventura, although in the latter film the question of whether the young woman died or ran away simply fades away to nothing as the movie goes on. Hitchcock’s Suspicion, recommended by JH, is one of my favorites of this type, though I think the chilling ambiguity of the final scene is unintentional. Perhaps in Suspicion the delicious ambiguity is created by dramatic irony, because my preferred reading of the situation–that we still don’t know, one way or the other, if her husband is the murderer–is at variance with the main character’s reading–she believes he’s innocent. In literature I suppose Borges is at the root of all this). We’ll also have to distinguish here between the kind of stories I’m describing and stories that wallow in mere randomness for its own sake, or that bluster portentously without getting to any particular point, or whose point is more atmospheric than narrative. Arty movies have a reputation for this kind of thing (Coffee and Cigarettes either mocked this stereotype or confirmed it). But in the stories I’m referring to, something does happen–we just can’t be sure, by the end, exactly what.
Of course, it’s possible in many cases that what I read as ambiguous is a simple roman á clef whose clef I don’t happen to have. I prefer it that way, and in this instance I’ll embrace my ignorance.
1 Comment
July 6, 2009 at 10:03 am
Well I think you put that into words quite nicely.
Thank you for blogging.