As I started reading An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge, I
knew I should be skeptical of the narrator. Due to the nature and title of this
class, “Truth, Lies and Literature,” and the biography we listened to on the first
day of class, I thought that the story might be embedded with a few lies here
or there. Regardless of my skeptical view of this article, as I started to read
and annotate, I realized that I was taking the reading fairly seriously.
The reading was very monotonous in
the beginning with a lot of unnecessary detail that I was trying to keep track
of. After awhile I felt like I had heard a similar story. When I got to the
part of the story where, “Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he
lost consciousness and was as one already dead," I realized that I had
watched a video clip of this story in my high school Psychology class. After
this realization, I started to feel very stupid and gullible. Even after having
watched this video clip, I was tricked into believing the beginning of the
story. Not only did I believe it, but it took me awhile before I realized that I had
heard this story before.
After my realization, it was just
laughable at how unrealistic the story seemed. Dodging several bullets in the
water, freeing his hands, being able to see from such a far distance and regain
his sensations all of a sudden … clearly there was something off. This reading
made me realize that even if I have heard a punch line of a joke in the past,
often times I find myself being stumped or shocked when I hear the same joke again. Even after seeing a movie,
I find myself forgetting the plot twist. I have always been very gullible and I
want to start reading with more of a skeptical eye and train myself to make
sense of information before believing in it so quickly.
It
is also difficult for me to believe that reading assignments given in a school context or things professors teach could contain false information and often times I do not question information
that may seem inaccurate in my other classes as well.
I just watched the film version of The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge that you talked about in this post. Wow. The comparisons between the two are so interesting.
ReplyDeleteIn the film, It really felt more realistic, which I think is due to the lack of narration by Bierce. Bierce's narration gave us many hints and sly comments that led us to question whether Farquhar's escape was real or not. However, in the film we are just watching from an outsider's perspective- 3rd person limited, rather than omniscient. Even though some parts are still hard to believe in the film, without Bierce's comments on consciousness, Peyton's "superhuman strength" (Bierce, 3), and the odd things that his senses perceive, it is much more believable. I feel like because of this, our "agagnorisis" is more likely to occur much later in the film than in the story.
Thank you Hiromi for bringing this cinematic adaptation of Bierce’s work to our attention. The fact that two rather different artistic media that successfully achieve the same manipulative effect on a third party’s psyche goes to show that realism isn’t exclusive to the written words.
ReplyDeleteIn class we’ve discussed written clues in the original text that pointed to the realism nature of Bierce’s work. In Enrico’s film, I would argue that we too would find a phantasmagoria of visual and audial equivalents that just as effectively constructs the manipulative framework.
In terms of visual alone, the audience experiences the same sense of immersion into the character’s mind through the force of the camera, which weaved in and out of first person point of view in a rather noticeable manner (e.g, the bottom-up shot of the officer , frame 3:22- 3:31, the top-down shots of Peyton’s feet, fr. 4:09-4:17 and fr. 8:12-8:13 ).
On one level, this fusion of vantage points from third to first and back to third person traps the audience in the fictional world (i.e. the audience becomes at once Peyton who is captured and about to be executed) while at the same time gives an illusion of omniscient presence (i.e. it also becomes at once the pair of eyes that follows Peyton). I would argue that this is the same effect Bierce seeks after in his written narrative.
On another level, this fusion provides an alternative route for the story to immediate the audience and passive-aggressively make it identify and sympathize with Peyton without resorting too much to the “Second Act/ Flashback Arc” like Bierce did (and consequently leaving us the impression that the shots of Peyton’s wife and child are mere fragments of imagination, not flashback). This alternative route is effective because it more or less has to do with how, as visual creatures, we take less time to process and store visual cues than written ones, especially those that are bloated with details (think how long a frame that captures the sheepish persona of Peyton would take, compared to how much time it takes for us to read to acquire the same information). So, while the film omits about one-third of the original material, but with a few visual twitch here and there, it delivers the message just as well.
We can analyze the film’s audio elements in this framework as well, or how the dialectic composition between the audio and visual elements from time to time accentuates the same manipulative drive. Ideas I’m thinking of include speed of celluloid transition versus speed of sound/ score, synchronization or the lack thereof of repetition of rhythm and repetition of sequence (especially near the end of the film). But I’ll leave them for now.