A Post-Modern Approach to Mind-Game Films

The last week’s screening, Orson Wells’s F for Fake made me realize something that I have been unaware of until that time. After finishing the film, I felt like somewhat disturbed and de-familiarized, which reminded me of the feeling I experience after I read a postmodern book. And that was the point where I came to this big realization! Mind-Game movies such as Run Lola Run, Memento, Bin-Jip, Mulholland Drive, in fact, are visual equivalents of postmodern novels with their fragmented and self-referential narrative styles and open-endedness, active viewer-text interaction and plots in which reality intermingles with imagination or illusion. These features of the films can be considered as the reflection of contemporary age where knowledge is diverse and on-going, reality is unfixed and questionable, urban space is chaotic and fragmented.

Thus, these movies, in a general sense, do not convey classical Hollywood narrative styles (with a beginning, climax and a proper ending) and plays with our conventional sense of perception of cinema. Breaking our conventions and delaying our expectations from narration, these movies actually leave audiences uneasy and confused in a sense, the feelings which might be regarded as akin to characters’ troubled minds or to the context the movie sets in.

Let’s take Bin-Jip for example. The movie is very minimalist in terms of dialogues, (a Kim-Kii Duk’s signature) but becomes so powerful with overwhelming cinematography and directing. Basically, it is a love story. The protagonist falls in love with a married woman who is oppressed by her husband and they run together. (still no dialogue between the two). The protagonist, then, is arrested as result of accusation of the woman’s husband. During the time he is in prison he learns to disguise himself, in other words, he becomes invisible. Using this ability, he starts living with the woman and her husband. However, only the woman is able to realize his presence in the house. That is the point where the movie diverges from the conventional and where reality merges with illusion. The audience is left with unanswered questions. How can he be visible? Is he alive or dead? or Is it just an imagination of the woman? Here, the technique of de-familiarization manifests itself as indistinctness between reality and illusion. From the beginning it is given an impression that there is not anything unreal about characters and plot as in a traditional movie. However, as the story advances, the gap between the real and illusion blurs, which causes the audience to feel puzzled and to question the existence of reality, which is one of the major debates of postmodernism as Baudrillard puts forward “we are not living in a world of reality but imitation of an imitation.”

Orson Wells’s F for Fake, alternatively, has a similar de-familiarization effect on the audience. The movie achieves this with an unusual editing technique, which is very fast-paced and quite fragmented. The movie, with these features, has similarities with Brechtian Theater. Along with the features mentioned above, what is striking about the movie is that we witness how the movie is made and Wells’ direct addressing to the audience. In other words, the movie, by referencing to itself continuously, reminds the audience that it is a movie. It is not real, it is just an illusion, and it is the fake itself, a metafiction effect Brecht aims to achieve in theater. Thus, the feeling on the audience is also unusual like the movie itself. The movie destroys our traditional sense of narration (which is relatively linear), makes us exhausted and detached from our surroundings.

To conclude, mind-game movies aim to play with our effort to make sense of disjointed, discontinuous and complex narratives. In addition, they play with our sense of reality by blending it with fantasy. After watching them, our expectations, created by previous encounters with cinema, are left puzzled and alienated, which, in turn, causes us to question the illusion of cinema itself.

Merve Ersoy