Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (review)

As critics have frequently noted, the idea of narrative complexity has gained currency within filmmaking over the past twenty years or so. An influential group of films—including such varied works as Pulp Fiction (1994), Run Lola Run (1999), and Memento (2000)—have utilized complicated flashback and flashforward structures, proposed alternative versions of the same story, and employed a multitude of intricate structuring devices, often to critical acclaim and popularity amongst a broad swath of moviegoers. Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending scripts for Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) have given him an auteur status within popular culture, while writer-directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and Alejandro González Iñárritu have staked their reputations as filmmakers on their screenplay credits as much as their work behind the camera.

Allan Cameron’s Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema offers a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarly literature surrounding this trend toward narrative complexity. Providing detailed analyses of ten works released from 1998 to 2004, Cameron argues that Eternal Sunshine, 21 Grams (2002), Russian Ark (2002), Time Code (2000), and others exemplify modular narrative, or “a database aesthetic, in which the narrative is divided into discrete segments and subjected to complex articulations” (1). Such a concept of cinematic storytelling not only constitutes a distinct trend in modern filmmaking (or so Cameron claims) but also offers an opportunity to think about how film narrative both reflects and works through contemporary ideas about temporality and its representation.

Cameron combines structural analysis of each film’s narrative with broader considerations of how each film’s construction of the relationship between temporality and narrative intersects with ideas about time expressed by modernist and postmodernist writers and filmmakers as well as those seen in digital media. This joining of “the formal, the technological, and the theoretical” differentiates Cameron’s work from fellow scholars writing on contemporary narrative complexity (17). David Bordwell’s analysis of Memento in The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, for example, examines that film more strictly in relation to viewer comprehension and experience, arguing that its seemingly complicated structures become counterbalanced by an increased level of viewer-guiding narrative redundancy. Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema might have benefited from some Bordwellian analysis of why these films have been successfully produced, distributed, exhibited, and received within their particular industrial moment—if only to ground Cameron’s highly theoretical text in the larger economic and aesthetic trends of 1990s and 2000s cinema. Still, Cameron persuasively positions the films within larger narrative and theoretical traditions.

In chapter 1, he divides contemporary modular narratives into four general categories. Anachronic narratives assemble narrative time in a manner somewhat similar to traditional flashbacks but “destabilize the hierarchy of first narratives and second narratives, so that no one temporal thread is able to establish clear dominance” (6). Pulp Fiction reflects this trend in that the film’s nonchronological ordering of story events is not cued by the traditional flashback device of a character in the present leading to a journey into the past via their memoires but rather remains unmotivated within the diegesis. Forking-path narratives like Run Lola Run and Groundhog Day (1993) imagine different versions of the same story, emphasizing the effect that small decisions can have upon the trajectory of their characters’ experience. Episodic narratives, which “critically weaken or disable the causal connections of classical narrative,” get divided into two subcategories (13). Abstract series, in which a formal structure within the film seems to supersede and control the organization of the narrative, can be seen in a film like 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993). Anthologies, in contrast, feature several seemingly unconnected narrative threads that end up occupying the same diegetic space (as in The Dekalog [1988–89] and Magnolia [1999]). Finally, split-screen narratives articulate their modular nature “along spatial rather than temporal lines,” splitting the screen into two or more distinct frames...