Week 5 Discussion
Part One: Escalation:
Squid Game’s world is one of risks, rules and escalating physical stakes. There’s an arc of escalating violence which sees Gi-hun’s gambling addiction turn from frustration to threats of violence from his creditors, who first give him a bloody nose, then escalate their threats of next taking a kidney, and then taking an eye if he still can’t pay up. The creditors will withdraw body parts for payment, as easily as Gi-hun withdraws cash from the ATM. Gi-hun’s body further becomes consensual currency when he plays the salesman’s game of Ddakji in the subway, becoming relentlessly slapped in the face until he wins. A victory which causes him to want to reciprocate the violence towards the salesman in further escalation, but is restrained. The violence only flows one-way, towards Gi-hun.
The inciting incident of Gi-hun becoming resigned to calling the number on the salesman’s card sees more physical violence escalation in being gassed in the car. In arriving into the pre-game, he is drawn into a fight with the other contestants. Not to help another, but to help himself. With each step, Gi-hun’s physical risk and financial reward intensifies, echoed by the literal escalation of the Esher-inspired stairwells which draw everyone upwards into the first game, where the stakes are highest. You move, you die. The episode escalates violence throughout, first with increasing individual violence towards Gi-hun by others, then the consensual violence of the subway game, expanding into communal violence between him and others, concluding with a massacre.
Part Two: Structure
I’ve visually mapped Pulp Fiction’s fabula and syuzhet here:
https://www.academicmatt.com/individual-assignments/crwr3200-week-5-discussion-pulp-fiction
I used Field’s method of 3x5 cards, extracting thirty scenes. First mapping the syuzhet, then using it to group events we know happen chronologically together as the fabula. Using the syuzhet to assemble the fabula, we get to see how the story really ends, with Butch and Fabienne riding off into the distance after Butch delivers the far better closing line of “Zed’s dead, baby” than the syuzhet’s Jules and Vincent saying they should leave the coffee shop.
Placing both fabula and syuzhet together, we find the non-linear structure of Pulp Fiction’s syuzhet organized into three episodes, which are extracted from the three days of the fabula. The syuzhet groups events around thematic threads over time as in the multi-day events of The Gold Watch, where Marsellus bribes Butch days before the fight but the same day as Jules and Vincent recover the briefcase, and where Vincent takes Mia out in between the two. The syuzhet also bookends the film in the coffee shop, splitting the entire movie between a single event. In the fabula these bookend scenes become combined into one continuous sequence which happens on day one. The fabula also helps us draw out three important character arcs of redemption with more clarity as they are organized by day instead of episode. God’s saving of Jules (Day One), Vincent’s heroic saving of Mia (Day Two), and Butch’s betrayal and redemptive rescue of Marsellus (Day Three).
Part Three: Worldbuilding
The films Get Out and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind create uncanny worlds where human consciousness through surgical adjustment is malleable, commercialized, at times supernatural, and has fallen into the hands of the corrupt. If Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind conveys a world where the pain from others can be erased, the patient’s memories fading away as the visual details of book jackets and individuals disappear around them, Get Out looks to preserve the people of the past through transplanting consciousness into living bodies. Both worlds orbit around the ethics of the medical professionals gone rogue, and where everyone ends up losing far more than they expect.
The dystopian logic of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind invites us into the near-future just far enough to be convincing that such a memory erasing procedure would be possible. Get Out is less believable in its transfer of consciousness, but entirely convincing in its depiction of racism and the subterfuge of luring fresh bodies out the Armitage mansion. Both films build worlds around relationships gone bad. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the world is built around the trauma of a breakup, where Get Out is built around Rose’s elaborate and ultimately violent deception of Chris. Audiences are asked to suspend their disbelief around the medicine of how the brain works just enough to propel the story forward, but to think about a world where we ask not just if we could do this, but if we should.
