Nolan's manipulation of time is much like what we have seen by the authors we have read this semester. Although this is my first time seeing this film, I think I can already make comparisons between the structure of this film, and that of the works we have read thus far. We saw the manipulation of time in the first text we read, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, where the reader is led to believe that millisecond moments are actually extensive emotion and sense filled experiences. We see a more obvious manipulation of time in Kindred, where quite literally, time is rewound and moved forward for Dana and her husband. We ended our semester with Aura and House of Danger, which both contain this manipulation, but in very different ways. In House of Danger , the reader jumps forward and backward in time, experiencing a variety of different "realities". In contrast, Fuentes suspends time, thus fogging his readers' perception of reality in his novella Aura.
In all these cases, including this film, the author or director uses time manipulation as a means to acquire control over the viewer. He or she is now in command of the progression of events and consequently how we feel about these occurrences, for we often determine our reaction to an event based on previous experiences. I believe that Nolan chooses to work backward in time in order to provoke certain feelings in his viewers. I expect these short rewound clips to some how converge at the end of the film, however I am hoping it is in an unexpected manner.
Your last paragraph makes an interesting point that I definitely agree with. There was a ton of manipulation going on not only in the film but outside of the film as well, which, when you mention the texts we've examined over this semester, really should come as no surprise.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the manipulation of time plays a large role in many texts that we have read in this course. By moving backwards, Nolan makes the movie more interesting because the viewer is always trying to piece together a sequence of events. It is also interesting to think of Nolan's other movies, especially Inception, which also successfully manipulates and layers time to add a new dimension to the plot of the movie.
ReplyDeleteI think another interesting manipulation of time that occurs in this movie is the freezing of Leonard in the time right after his wife's "death" (still not sure when she actually died). Austin talks about this a bit in his post, how Leonard's feelings, goals, and actions all center around what he can remember most clearly, his wife's attack. It's like he is reliving the same section of life over and over again, killing man after man because he cannot remember actually obtaining his vengeance. He is stuck in a loop.
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