Tricks Will Change in Forms of Tales

Between forms of tales, the same trick can work in different ways

Film and Prose

The Narrator in a tale is the voice of its talesman. In a prose tale, this voice is made of words. In a film, this voice is made of shots and sounds and cuts.

The Voice of God in Films

In the film of Little Children the shots and sounds and cuts are joined by the Voice of God, a Narrator who speaks to us but never shows up on camera, who sees into the hearts of all the characters, and who has no place in the world the shots show us. This Narrator tells us, in that most-terse way that bald narration has, of the thoughts and feelings of the main characters. The words the Narrator uses are just the same words that we would find in a novel. And yet the effect on us is quite different.

In a novel, a phrase such as —

“Brad waited for his good sense to say no … he was surprised when he found himself agreeing.”

— brings us closer to the character, we feel as one with him, and our experience of the tale is a more intimate sharing of Brad’s life. But in the film we see Brad on screen, and we hear the unbodied, godlike tones of the Narrator who tells us these same words, and we find ourselves put apart from Brad, we look at him from afar, and examine him as if he were a man of some foreign race or culture. This effect is made stronger the first time the Narrator speaks, when he tells us how Sarah asks herself to look on the other housewives in the park as part of an ‘experiment in anthropology.’

Stream of Consciousness

In the film this distance helps us to see all the people in this Connecticut town as part os some other culture. It also helps to bring out the dark humor in scenes which, if we felt closer to the characters and lacked this distance, wouldn’t be funny at all.

The film is long and the Narrator helps us to know things that (if they were told by shots and sounds and cuts alone) would take many more minutes to tell, and even then we might not know them so clearly. But these things might have also been told by voice-overs from the characters themselves, fragments of thoughts drifting in and out like a stream of consciousness. This would have pulled us in closer to the characters and done away with the distance.

Oddly enough, if a stream of consciousness had been put in words in the novel, it would not have brought us so close to the characters as the bald Narrator does in prose.

So in different forms of talesmanship, the same tricks can have different effects on the audience.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday, March 4, 2008)