Week 6 Discussion
Part One:
Christopher Nolan’s Memento honors the idea of Jonathan Nolan’s short story through extrapolating it into a subjective set of experiences which move backwards in time, and an objective set of sequences which, at least to begin with, move forwards in time. The screenplay chooses to deny the audience the same information that the protagonist is denied, which causes the story to be told in reverse, a series of flashbacks which go further and further back in time as the movie moves forward, alternating between objective and subjective depictions of Leonard’s point of view. Nolan further reinforces the interiority and exteriority of how time is moving for Leonard by treating the forwards-moving objective sequences in a black and white documentary style, and the subjective backwards-moving scenes in the real-world of color. This causes the chronology of the movie to bend back upon itself, ending where the subjective and objective chronologies meet, which is the middle of the fabula but the end of the syuzhet. In the subjective sequences we are inside Leonard’s head, in the objective ones we are outside looking in. When the movie ends we are in both.
In doing this, the screenplay honors the integrity of the original short story, but moves between the interiority which characterizes the short story and the exteriority of situating it in space and time for the film. As Field suggests, this process of adaptation begins to develop its own logic and meaning and departs from the source material in substance, but not in spirit. As a murder mystery told as a series of flashbacks, there are also ambiguous events which happen in Leonard’s long-term memory, before his injury, which are also punctuated throughout and proceed the objective sequences, but are not as specifically situated in time as the objective and subjective parts of the story. They are simply ‘the before’. Yet this tension between our subjective experiencing of the world, and the objective portrayal of it on screen and on the page, is as Nolan accurately points out, one of the reasons we go to the movies in the first place.
Part Two:
For this exercise I created an interactive timeline which breaks apart Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and places each scene against its corresponding verifiable truth: https://www.academicmatt.com/crwr3200-bonnie-clyde-timeline
Newman and Benton’s Bonnie and Clyde individualizes truth through its construction of composite characters, its invention of emotion, and its historical repositioning of events towards a moral good. Getaway driver C.W. Moss is a combination of several real-life Barrow gang associates into a single individual, and his father’s betrayal of them a fabrication. The romantic escalation between Bonnie and Clyde serves the story well, but is more fiction than truth, especially Clyde’s reluctance to become intimate with Bonnie. The screenplay hints at the trauma of Clyde’s years of being raped in prison, but was likely deemed too shocking for a 1967 audience. Instead we are treated to Clyde’s real-life limp, caused by cutting two toes off to avoid the prison’s hard labor, and his subsequent parole the following week.
The creative arc of the movie dramatizes Bonnie and Clyde as two modern-day Robin Hood characters, stealing from the banks who would otherwise foreclose on the poor. Even as he kills, movie Clyde repeatedly mentions how he’s not trying to hurt people, and even refuses to rob some of a bank’s customers during a job. This is not true. Historical accounts confirm that both were petty thieves with little moral compass, who found themselves moving from robbery to murder as their appetites for greed increased. Any sympathy we might have for them fighting an uncaring system during The Great Depression is fiction, but still makes for a more compelling story.
Much contemporary photographic evidence of their exploits remains, and the film honors this with historical accuracy, including the couple’s posing with their weapons, the inaccuracy of newspaper reporting, and their eventual brutal killing at the hands of the police. In adapting the indiscriminate nature of their killing spree, the screenplay wraps it in a romantic tale of moral good. The reckless abandon which characterizes their young lives, as Field describes, honors the main beats of the historical events, but is historically inaccurate about the emotions which propelled those decisions. However, the selective historical focus has produced a highly compelling film, which tells its own truth, just like history itself.
