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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Renowned narratologists, especially those focusing on film studies, have little interest in the
prologue as a narrative device. I argue that this film segment is crucial in postmodern narratives, usually
characterized by their nonlinearity. In films that feature it, this introductory scene/sequence is part of the
work’s complex embroidery and is formally produced in the same style of the overall film, alerting to its
tone, nonlinearity, self-reflexive nature, theme, and metanarrative discourse. Like all prologues, it explains
part of what is to follow and engages the viewer’s curiosity. I call these segments hermeneutic decoders.
However, in complex narratives they also deliberately hide the film’s full story and/or real meaning in plain
sight. They engage the viewer’s cognitive abilities but manage to be as enigmatic as the rest of the film (de-
spite containing most of the clues to its understanding). I will provide examples from several established
categories of complex films and will deal with a specific case study in more detail: David Lynch’s INLAND
EMPIRE (2006), which belongs to an undecipherable category of narratives that Kiss and Willemsen call
“impossible puzzle films.” After a detailed analysis of the hermeneutic decoder, I will explain how it provides
all the clues for an account of the film as an allegory of spectatorship from two theoretical standpoints:
Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image and Jacques Lacan’s notion of the gaze. The aporetical enunciation
and the duplicated gaze, in tandem, form the key to the film’s narrative enigma, open to an intense hermeneutic
activity that is nevertheless, and necessarily, frustrated.
Description
Keywords
Hermeneutic decoder Prologue Complex narratives Enigma films INLAND EMPIRE
Citation
Publisher
The Faculty of Theater and Television, Babeș-Bolyai University