Last night, I watched a very curious film called Bernie. It tells the story of Bernie
Tiede, a charming mortician in Texas who befriends a controlling and
manipulative shrew of a rich widow, subsequently killing her and using her money
to improve the lives of everyone in the town.
The story itself is rather enthralling for sure. It is a
very distinctive and “too-weird-to-be-made-up” tale of the morality and
justifications of murder (of course, murder is wrong, but, if you watch the
film, you will understand what I mean).
However, what is more intriguing to me is how the story is told—in other words,
the narrative structure of the film.
If you have not yet seen the movie, then you should; if for
no other reason than to just observe this unique narrative structure and how it
develops characters and situations without using very much direct contact with
the characters themselves.
The story is based on actual events that happened in the
mid-1990s, thus, many of the individuals involved in the story are still alive
today. This is used by the director and writer to tell the story in an unusual
blend of fictional representation and actual testimony by those involved.
On the one hand, it uses the fictional representation of the
major characters involved, portrayed by several A-list actors like Jack Black
and Matthew McConaughey. This part seems very “Hollywood.”
Then, it uses cross-cuts and “talking heads” of real
citizens of the town where the murder took place, giving their perspective on
certain stages of the story. This part seems very “Michael Moore.”
This combination of Black Comedy film and historical
documentary creates a genre in itself.
This unique way of portraying this story got me thinking
about the nature of narrative structure and how it is represented in the
literature that we ingest. Generally speaking, the narrative structure of any
piece of literature is presented via the three pillars of storytelling—plot,
character, setting (or, as I like to call it, “concept”).
However, Bernie
introduces a new way to portray these three pillars via the documentary style.
Much of the characterization of Bernie and Marjorie (the deceased). We of
course see scenes of Bernie and Marjorie, both together and by themselves; but
the bulk of the characterization, we get directly from the mouths of people
that knew the characters.
Now, I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone wanting to
watch the film, but essentially, through these talking heads, we learn that
Marjorie was an absolutely terrible person. Her own sister is recorded as
calling her “The Devil on Earth.” This is done in a way that would have taken
the actress hours of screen time to fully demonstrate. We get direct reviews on
the woman’s character, making her more and more disagreeable as more people
give testimony. This characterizes her within just a few moments—before the
actress says a word.
Though we see through the actor portrayal of her that she is
very unpleasant, but much of the characterization of how terrible she is comes
from those talking heads., making her progression of characterization very
uniquely complimented by the documentary style and the actress portrayal in
conjunction.
The reason I go into such great detail about this narrative
structure and alternative characterization strategies is because I am coming to
realize that the boundaries of how a narrative must be told are ever expanding.
The director and writer could have elected to fictionalize the entire story of
Bernie and Marjorie into a purely cinematic vessel. Alternatively, they could
have gone the other way and portrayed the stories in a purely factual vessel—a
“real” documentary. But, they instead chose somewhere right in the middle—a new
way of telling a story using both fact and actor representation; a sort of
“Fic-Fac” (a term I just coined).
Of course, this isn’t necessarily “new.” We’ve seen the Ken
Burns documentaries where reenactments are performed by actors to give the
audience a better idea of how the situation played out. But, Bernie is a new representation of that
style breaking forth to become a vessel through which a story may be told.
While these Ken Burns-esque stories were told in documentary style with some
actor portrays, it still leaned heavily on the fact-oriented structure. Bernie went the other way, leaning more
on the actor representations than a facts-based structure.
Narrative structure is become more and more subjective. Not
only can you lump genres together to make weird and amazing mash-ups (Like Joss
Whedon’s magnum opus, Firefly); now,
you can combine narrative forms of portraying stories and information to make
something absolutely and irrevocably distinctive.
A narrative structure is the way in which a story is told. Bernie makes it clear that the only stipulation to this is
that those stories are portrayed. How this is done is subjective to what the
situation calls for. In the case of Bernie,
the story was best told in a film-documentary hybrid of Fic-Fac. But, it is
also made clear that no story has a single formula in which it has to be told.
I am not necessarily an advocate for experimental fiction, but I do find that
it has its merits, particularly in spear-heading ways to tell stories. It just
comes down to how the story should be
told. Again, this is subjective, but it is an important question for any writer
to ask about a new work.
So, how should your story be told?
Cheers
No comments:
Post a Comment