Erlend Lavik

Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in "Twist Movies"?

part from the acting of young Haley Joel Osment, which won universal praise, The Sixth Sense met with mixed reviews. Stephen Holden of the New York Times called it “gaggingly mawkish supernatural kitsch,” while Desson Howe of the Washington Post found the direction “superb” and the writing “wonderfully mystical,” with “a twist that will put your head in a swirl.” The surprise ending, of course, was the film’s major talking point and was discussed endlessly on internet chat forums. Some found it a contrived gimmick. Some remained unaffected, claiming they saw the twist coming a mile away. Others found the finale a brilliantly executed piece of cinematic storytelling. Much of the controversy centered on the question of whether or not the film actually “made sense,” whether or not it was logically consistent. Having seen the film, people intuitively try (to some extent at least) to test and compare the new piece of information—that Malcolm was dead the whole time—with what preceded it. Was he not wearing different outfits at different times in the movie? If so, how did he manage to change clothes? How could he have dinner with his wife in a restaurant on their wedding anniversary if he was already dead? Why could we not see his gunshot wound (which we do see in the montage sequence at the end)? After all, the fatal injuries of all the other ghosts that we see in the movie are visible to us. This essay is divided into two parts. The first part examines one of the key questions that a historical poetics of cinema seeks to answer according to David Bordwell: what are the principles according to which films (in this case, a single film) are constructed, and how do they achieve particular effects? (“Historical Poetics of Cinema” 371). In practice this means that I want to examine the Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense:

New Narrative Depths

Abstract The article aims to tease out an implicit, possibly even instinctive, assumption about why big-budget blockbuster storylines come up short compared to other kinds of culturally sanctioned narratives. Briefly, the assumption is that there is a distinct difference between stories that are simply a pretext for a series of isolated attractions and stories that are guided by some greater predefined purpose or guiding idea. If we look more closely at it, this presumption throws up some surprising and paradoxical findings. My hypothesis is that this line of reasoning has tended to seep into the debate about classical and postclassical Hollywood cinema. The article argues that we should not take this assumption for granted, and that it has confused the debate about historical changes in Hollywood films. However, by restating the opposition between blockbuster narratives and more prestigious story-types in different terms, we can study blockbuster cinema from a more productive perspective than has been the case so far.

‘Not the obstacle but the means’: Film history and the postmodern challenge

This article consists of two main parts. The first part provides a brief summary of the historico-philosophical debate between so-called modernist and postmodernist historians, before moving on to an investigation of how film historians have responded to the challenge posed by postmodern historiography. As it turns out, they have very rarely taken into account the epistemological issues raised by postmodern historians, possibly because the field of film history for so long was rather out of sync with most other kinds of history, relying as it did on anecdotal accounts of heroic individuals. Only after turning to methodical, archive-based research in the early 1980s could postmodern historiography become an issue, for presumably there has to be a body of accumulated knowledge to critique and be reflexive about in the first place. The second part of the article considers the possible practical consequences of postmodern historiography by looking at two competing accounts of the transition in American cinema in the late 1970s and early 1980s from the Hollywood renaissance to the blockbuster era. The two accounts are not postmodern, but I hope to suggest a different epistemological ideal from which to consider them that might be thought of as postmodern.