Watching Sleepless in Seattle, it feels as if director Nora Ephron has read David Bordwell’s essay “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures” and intentionally modeled her movie after the conventions he lays out. Sleepless matches up almost perfectly to Bordwell’s definition of a classical Hollywood film.
Bordwell’s first claim is that “the classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals.” Very early in the film, the psychological motivations of both Sam (Tom Hanks) and Annie (Meg Ryan) are made clear and the goals or problems they deal with follow from those motivations. Sam loves his son Jonah and misses his deceased wife; his problem or goal is to find a new woman to love and fill the void in his life. Annie wants to find a man who can satisfy her idealized vision of love, a vision that is shaped by her mother’s memories and Cary Grant films.
He then posits “a double causal [narrative] structure, two plot lines.” The first plot line involves heterosexual romance. In Sleepless this is obviously the long distance love interest between Sam and Annie. Will they ever meet? Are they actually meant to be together as the film would have us believe? The other plot line involves “another sphere” of the characters’ lives; in this case it seems to be “other personal relationships.” The film spends a lot of time developing Sam’s relationship with Jonah and Annie’s relationship with her fiancé. Sam wants to make his son happy by finding another woman to be with and Annie must determine if her fiancé is actually the man she is meant to be with. Of course these plot lines tie in very closely to the heterosexual love interest but they are ultimately distinct. Annie’s struggle fits this especially well. The climax of this narrative is when she returns her engagement ring to her fiancé and leaves to find Sam on the Empire State Building.
Also typical of classic Hollywood is the happy ending. Although we never know for sure what happens once Sam and Annie finally meet in person (we never even see them hold a conversation), clues in the film indicate that they will live ‘happily ever after.’ Both characters have conversations about the magic of love when hands touch for the first time. Ephron’s camera focuses in on Sam and Annie’s hands as when they first meet and the implication is that they have experienced that magic. I imagine that if the electricity hadn’t been present the two would have dropped hands immediately, realizing that it simply wasn’t meant to be. The looks on their faces and the continued physical contact of hand holding indicate that Sam and Annie have in fact met their respective soul mates.
Beyond conventions of plot or syuzhet, Bordwell lays out some specific narrative hallmarks of classic Hollywood films. He says that “classical narration tends to be omniscient, highly communicative, and only moderately self-conscious.” The narrator in Sleepless in Seattle is the camera; there are no voiceovers or omniscient characters. The camera itself is omniscient though because it reveals to the viewer the thoughts and actions of both protagonists even though they are separated by the distance of the American continent. We see Sam’s half-dreaming conversation with his deceased wife. We see Annie pour out her doubts to her friend only to present a very different face in public and with her fiancé. Incidences like these contribute to the viewer having a perspective on events that is above and beyond any character; we know the actions and thoughts that are happening at all times, even when they are known to only one person within the movie. This narrative omniscience goes along with the communicative aspect of classical narration – Ephron never leaves any gaps in our knowledge. Events move forward in a basic cause and effect manner; if any information is cut out, the dialogue fills us in on what we missed. This device is never obvious though; the narration is mostly covert. The one device that does indicate moderate self-consciousness is the technique of showing the map of the United States and the path of a plane to indicate that characters are traversing time and distance. Like the rest of the film techniques in Sleepless though, this is simply a vehicle for the transmission of the story; the film is plot driven rather than overtly concerned with style.
So Sleepless in Seattle fits neatly into Bordwell’s conventions of a classic Hollywood movie. To me, this is actually the film’s biggest weakness – it is too conventional. Ephron never takes us out of our comfort zone as we watch her movie. Once events get set in motion, we can easily predict what will happen next. Sam and Annie, despite a few bumps in the road, will eventually get together and have a joint happy ending. In order to make a more memorable or enjoyable film, Ephron should have bucked the conventions in at least a few minor ways. By following the classical formula so closely, she left very little doubt or tension as to what would ultimately happen. In an effort to make her film different from other classical movies that followed the same basic outline, the director ended up with a premise that seems too far fetched to be believable. Why would two people who have never met and live on opposite ends of the country fall in love? To the viewer, the answer to this question is irrelevant because we know that, as a film made in the classical Hollywood style, the movie will conclude with Sam and Annie falling in love. Efforts to answer the “why” largely fall flat as Ephron relies on our preconceived expectations of a happy ending to justify the unbelievability of her film.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Great blog. You make good arguments and follow with supporting examples. I liked your opinion that “I imagine that if the electricity hadn’t been present the two would have dropped hands immediately, realizing that it simply wasn’t meant to be.” The movie therefore has done an excellent job in convincing us of the “magic” that Annie and Sam believed in and had for each other. I also agree that Ephron did a great job in following the film conventions that Bordwell described and does not break the classic form. However, I don’t believe in your argument that the film is too conventional. I personally think there can never be enough classical Hollywood cinema and if this is what Ephron was after then she did a great job at achieving it! The minor bumps in the road are large enough to keep the plot moving and keep it believable.
Great job Cullen. I agree with almost all of your arguments, and I especially like your description of the camera as the omniscient narrator. I did not think of it this way. I assumed that because there was no voiceover, there was no narrator; however, now I am considering your argument and rethinking the film, and I definitely agree that the camera is an omniscient narrator. The camera always knows who to show, the camera connects Annie and Sam's actions, and phrases. Much of this is due to continuity editing and film techniques, which you allude to at the end of that paragraph. I do agree that the film was extremely conventional, but I do not think it is too conventional. Ephron wanted to make a cliche, classical film, and she succeeds. Even though it is predictable, I thought the film techniques were very well done, and the movie was still enjoyable.
Awesome job--Your blog is very well organized and your explanations are all very clear. In particular, I want to address two paragraphs that I particularly appreciate. In the third paragraph, you clearly explain the nature of the dual plotline in Sleepless in Seattle. A lot of people have said that there isn't one, and many that there is. But you acknowledge that Annie and Sam's conflicts/quests outside of their romance are indeed closely connected to the romantic plot, but nonetheless distinct. You also use evidence to show how these other plotlines fall under Bordwell's definition of acceptable types (when you say they fall under the "other personal relationships" category that he mentions). Your last paragraph stood out, as well. Sure, this film might fall under the category of classic Hollywood film in many ways, but does this make it a better movie? You seem to suggest it does not, and I agree. The movie is pleasant, but its possible to get bored with such predictable perfection.
I believe that you do underline the major problem, that the film is too conventional. And I feel as though the problem is compounded because the only way the film breaks convention is to comment on how guys feel about romantic comedies. The film manages to make a comment on the absurdity of romantic comedies, and then present a scenario even more contrived than even most traditional romantic comedies. It's easy enought to feel good about the ending, but it requires quite a bit of doublethink.
The last paragraph of your piece was definitely the most powerful, and made a very serious claim that took the entire piece beyond the standard definition match-up between film and article. Does "too conventional" automatically entail a sense of surrealism or unbelievability? I don't think that is necessarily the case. I agree with you that in the instance of this particular movie, the ending was marked by a sense of melodrama that negated the intentions of the director and the editing techniques that had been employed to forward believability. However, I don't believe that that effect was a result of over-conventionality, but rather the implausibility of the plotline and our own inherent cynicism. Conventionality, on the other hand, is that just that - following and meeting our expectations about a certain genre. Our expectations, in turn, are based on our own experiences and conceptions of reality. A conventional film, therefore, should actually be MORE believable to us, rather than less. That's not to say that it will be interesting, of course. As you put it very well, the lack of doubt or tension made the film rather wishy-washy for us. I'm sure, however, that the film was meant to appeal to a different demographic group than ours, so perhaps our entire argument is moot :).
I am so glad that you brought up the conventional aspect of the movie. It is incredibly generic. It plays out like any romantic. It plays off of archetypes for characters as well as our archetype for plotline. It is very spacially continuous and in terms of time it is chronological. I am also happy that you brought up the ending part. Naturally, I know what we as an audience are supposed to think at the end: that these people will be happy and live happily ever after. It's unrealistic, but so is everything else. I am also impressed that you brought up that another plotline is how these people are trying to create new relationships in general.
I definitely agree with your characterization of the movie as generic and conventional. I wonder whether this is done deliberately by the director as a type of homage to classical Hollywood cinema though? I do think that the final plot resolution plays into what I have been saying in other people's blogs, namely that that film is self-reflexive in terms of Hollywood cinema by using An Affair to Remember as the basis for true love. This is why the relationship sometimes seems too fake, because it is cinematic at its core. Good job in te blog.
Conventional, indeed. As you deftly show, it's classical hollywood to the core. Interesting how for you conventional = boring. For some (as other blogs and comments show) films that adhere to generic conventions satisfy deep audience expectations, so = fabulous. The film itself seems to suggest that women are more likely to be swayed by Hollywood conventions than men (it's women who get swept up in An Affair to Remember). I suppose it depends on what genre we're talking about...
Post a Comment